Abstract
The deployment of femtocells in conventional macrocells is expected to solve the indoor coverage problems in a cost effective manner. However the key requirement for efficient co-channel macro/femto cell deployment is the suppression of interference. This paper proposes a sleep mode activation procedure for femtocell base stations based on the interference mitigation for macrocell user equipments (MUEs) results of the system level simulation with realistic LTE-A system parameters have shown that the proposed procedure improves the signal quality for the MUEs and reduces the number of blocked MUEs up to 60% compared to no sleep mode scenario. Moreover, the algorithm presents power consumption saving opportunities of approximately 55% in femtocell networks with respect to no sleep mode activation scenario. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.