Systems and methods are provided for a distributed inter-cell interference avoidance (ICIA) technique for avoiding co-channel interference between femtocell networks and macrocell networks. At the macrocell, user equipments sense the downlink (DL) spectrum and detects whether there are any nearby interfering femtocells. If there is any interference, a macrocell base station appropriately re-schedules the DL resources and also uses a mapping function to re-schedule uplink (UL) resources based on the re-scheduled DL resources. At the femtocell, a femtocell base station senses the UL spectrum to detect for interference from nearby macrocell users. If there is interference, femtocell gives priority for use of the resources to the macrocell by releasing UL resources. Femtocell may also use the same mapping function to obtain the DL resources used by the macrocell and to re-schedule DL and UL resources of the femtocell to avoid using the DL and UL resources of the macrocell.