Neighbor-friendly autonomous power control in wireless heterogeneous networks

The widespread deployment of base stations constitutes a promising solution to cope with the ever-increasing wireless data rate demands. However, it also increases the interference levels, especially at the cell-edge. Most interference management techniques assume coordination between base stations, which involves undesired overhead and delays. To solve this problem, we propose a neighbor-friendly autonomous algorithm for power control in wireless heterogeneous networks that protects victim users from neighboring cells through a penalty factor in the power allocation level. We refer to this algorithm as neighbor-friendly iterative waterfilling (NF-IWF). In addition, we propose a low-complexity closed-form version that fixes the penalty factor by assuming a linear approximation of the victim user data rate. In high interference conditions, it can achieve a victim user data rate increase by a factor of 3.5 compared to IWF, 15 compared to soft frequency reuse (SFR), and 60 compared to equal power allocation (EPA) with a marginal decrease of the primary user data rate.