Transmit power self-calibration for residential UMTS/HSPA+ femtocells

Abstract

Downlink transmit power calibration is critical for femtocell deployment to achieve a good tradeoff between downlink coverage and interference impact to a co-channel macrocell network. In this paper, we study the performance of a femtocell power calibration algorithm that uses mobile reports to learn key information such as required coverage region for its own users and amount of interference to non-allowed users to fine-tune the femtocell downlink transmit power. It is shown that such a scheme is able to adapt to different deployment scenarios and provides better control of coverage-interference tradeoff than that provided by algorithms based on Network Listen Module alone.