Uplink power control for heterogeneous networks

Small cells have emerged as a solution to increase both the capacity and the coverage while reducing both capital expenditures and operating expense. However, introduction of small cells also bring severe interference between macro cells and small cells, which severely degrades the performance of heterogeneous networks. New enhanced InterCell Interference Coordination (eICIC) techniques are required to adapt to the specialty of Hetnet. In this paper, we proposed a new uplink power control scheme for Hetnet, which directly controls the interference to neighboring eNodeB while improves edge UEs' performance at best by considering different interference acceptance level for macro cells and small cells. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms traditional fractional power control scheme in terms of both edge performance and average performance.