Coordinated Inter-Cell Interference Management for Expanded Region Picocells in Heterogeneous Network

To deal with the shrink of Picocell Downlink (DL) coverage areas, the concept of Cell Range Expansion (CRE) has been proposed, in which a positive value is added to the DL Reference Signal Received Power (RSRP) of picocell pilot signals.Although CRE will expand DL picocell footprint, it may also lead to severe DL inter-cell interference from macrocells since some picocell User Equipments (UEs) are not connected to the cells that provide the strongest RSRP. In this paper, we propose a new coordinated interference management scheme for macrocell-picocell Heterogeneous Network (HetNet) to improve the signal quality of picocell UEs. The proposed method is to coordinate frequency and power resources within a set of resource allocation restrictions. Based on the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) standardization, system level simulation results show that compared with alternative approaches, the proposed method can mitigate outages, improve cell-edge UEs' performance and bring a significant increase in overall system throughput.

[1]  Chengwen Xing,et al.  Performance of Superposition Coding for Downlink Coordinated Two-Point System , 2013, IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology.

[2]  Nobuhiko Miki,et al.  Performance evaluation of inter-cell interference coordination and cell range expansion in heterogeneous networks for LTE-Advanced downlink , 2011, 2011 8th International Symposium on Wireless Communication Systems.

[3]  Ching-Hao Huang,et al.  An interference management scheme for heterogeneous network with cell range extension , 2011, 2011 13th Asia-Pacific Network Operations and Management Symposium.

[4]  David López-Pérez,et al.  Inter-Cell Interference Coordination for Expanded Region Picocells in Heterogeneous Networks , 2011, 2011 Proceedings of 20th International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (ICCCN).

[5]  Qimei Cui,et al.  Closed-form solution for minimizing power consumption in coordinated transmissions , 2012, EURASIP J. Wirel. Commun. Netw..

[6]  Ismail Güvenç,et al.  Range Expansion and Inter-Cell Interference Coordination (ICIC) for Picocell Networks , 2011, 2011 IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC Fall).

[7]  Xiaoli Chu,et al.  On the Expanded Region of Picocells in Heterogeneous Networks , 2012, IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing.

[8]  Che-Sheng Chiu,et al.  An Interference Coordination Scheme for Picocell Range Expansion in Heterogeneous Networks , 2012, 2012 IEEE 75th Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC Spring).