  Small cells have been identified as an effective solution for coping with the
important traffic increase that is expected in the coming years. But this
solution is accompanied by additional interference that needs to be mitigated.
The enhanced Inter Cell Interference Coordination (eICIC) feature has been
introduced to address the interference problem. eICIC involves two parameters
which need to be optimized, namely the Cell Range Extension (CRE) of the small
cells and the ABS ratio (ABSr) which defines a mute ratio for the macro cell to
reduce the interference it produces. In this paper we propose self-optimizing
algorithms for the eICIC. The CRE is adjusted by means of load balancing
algorithm. The ABSr parameter is optimized by maximizing a proportional fair
utility of user throughputs. The convergence of the algorithms is proven using
stochastic approximation theorems. Numerical simulations illustrate the
important performance gain brought about by the different algorithms.
