Interference Mitigation Using Enhanced Active Power Control Technique for 5G Downlink Transmission of Macro-Femto Cellular Networks

Femtocells are overlayed on existing Macrocells to reduce cost of mounting expensive macrocell nodes, improve cellular network coverage, capacity and Data rate performance. However, Macro-Femto heterogeneous (HetNet) network has a major problem of co-tier and cross-tier interference, which hinders its optimal performance, especially when the network capacity expands. With emergence of 5G technologies, interference would become more consequential. This paper deployed an enhanced active power control (EAPC) technique in mitigating Macro-Femto interference along downlink transmission of 5G non-stand-alone (NSA) architecture. The EAPC technique when compared with APC and PC1 techniques respectively yielded: 65% and 37% higher home user equipment (HUE) data rate; 37% and 21 % higher macro user equipment (MUE) data rate. EAPC average power usage compared to that of APC and PC1 conserved 54% and 22% Hen-gNB energy respectively. EAPC technique conserved 21 % en-gNB energy when compared to APC, but was limited when compared with PC1 by 8%; which should be considered in further studies.