Performance Analysis of Frequency-Domain Inter-Cell Interference-Coordination in 3GPP LTE for Heterogenous Networks

LTE Rel. 10 provides mechanisms to enable so-called enhanced inter-cell interference-coordination (eICIC). eICIC is a time-domain ICIC concept, which is able to increase the downlink (DL) performance in heterogeneous networks. In this paper a concept for downlink frequency-domain ICIC (FD-ICIC) is presented. FD-ICIC can be adapted to fully exploit the features of diverse Rel.8/9 and Rel.10 Single- and Multi-Carrier systems. The concept is based on transmit power reduction of the macro eNB on a fraction of the frequency resources. The performance analysis shows that FD-ICIC can achieve system performance gains which are similar to eICIC gains. Compared to eICIC the advantage of FD-ICIC is that it can already be applied to Rel. 8/9 system and that it does not require any time-synchronization between macro and pico eNB if applied to multi-carrier systems. Keywords ­ interference coordination; heterogenous networks; 4G; LTE