Base Station Downlink DTX Designs for Interference Mitigation in High-Performance LTE Networks

To evolve the LTE network to cope with ever and rapidly increasing demand for mobile broadband services and traffic volumes, interference avoidance designs have been identified as one major area to address in the next LTE release. In both traditional homogeneous macro network and heterogeneous network with mix of macro and small cells, intercell interference can be substantially reduced by temporarily halting unneeded downlink transmission. In this paper, we analyze several design aspects of such base station downlink discontinuous transmission (DTX) operations. We provide extensive performance evaluation results and analysis on (1) the time scale of such DTX operations; and (2) whether the DTX operations should be restricted to the small cells only. The results provide guideline for an ideal combination of these design dimensions.