Heterogeneous Cellular Networks

5

Inter-cell Interference Management for Heterogeneous Networks

Sai Ho Wong and Zander Zhongding Lei

Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore

5.1 Introduction

Both 3GPP LTE-Advanced [1] and IEEE WirelessMAN-Advanced have been found to fulfil the requirements [2] defined by IMT-Advanced for fourth generation (4G) cellular mobile networks. Both employ similar technologies, such as OFDMA combined with multiple antennas, channel dependent scheduling and carrier aggregation (CA). It has been shown in [3] that the targeted data rates and spectrum efficiencies can be achieved by employing advanced multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) techniques and aggregating multiple component carriers for LTE-Advanced. Commercial operation of LTE and WiMAX networks have started in several countries and deployment for these pre-4G technologies is expected to accelerate rapidly in the next few years. With the spectral efficiency per link of pre-4G technologies already approaching theoretical limits [4], it is important for 4G cellular networks to provide good user experience and quality of service (QoS) everywhere within the cell coverage. One of the enabling techniques is a topology known as heterogeneous networks (HetNets) [5], in which operators leverage on the economy of scale provided by the already-deployed 3G networks and reuse the infrastructure effectively.

In traditional homogeneous cellular networks, the base stations are of similar coverage and are carefully planned by operators with ...