A Downlink Load Control Scheme with a Dynamic Load Threshold and Virtual Coverage Management for Two-Tier Femtocell Networks

This paper proposes a dynamic downlink load control scheme that jointly employs dynamic load threshold management and virtual coverage management schemes to reduce the degree of performance degradation due to traffic overload in two-tier femtocell networks. With the proposed scheme, the downlink load in a serving macrocell is controlled with a load threshold which is adjusted dynamically depending on the varying downlink load conditions of neighboring macrocells. In addition, traffic overloading is alleviated by virtually adjusting the coverage of the overloaded serving macrocell, based on the adjusted load threshold of the serving macrocell. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme improves the performance of two-tier femtocell networks in terms of the outage probability and sum throughput. This improvement is significantly increased with appropriate values of load thresholds and with an intermediate-level adjustment of the virtual coverage area (i.e., handover hysteresis margin: HOM). Furthermore, the proposed scheme outperforms both a previously proposed load control scheme with a static load threshold and the LTE system without a HOM adjustment.