Cognitive-Empowered Femtocells: An Intelligent Paradigm for Femtocell Networks

Deploying femtocells has been taken as an effective solution for removing coverage holes and improving wireless service performance in 3G-beyond wireless networks such as WiMAX and Long Term Evolution (LTE). This article investigates a novel framework of dynamic spectrum management for femtocell networks, called cognitive-empowered femtocells (CEF), aiming at mitigating both cross-tier and intratier interferences with minimum modifications required on the corresponding macrocell network. With the proposed framework, each CEF base station (BS) and the femtocell users can utilize spatiotemporally available radio resources for the access traffic. We conclude that the proposed CEF framework can effectively complement the existing femtocell design and serve as a value-added feature to the state-of-the-art femtocell technologies, while achieving high scalability and interoperability by minimizing the required modifications on the macrocell protocol design.