A modulation technique for active interference design under downlink cellular OFDMA networks

In cellular systems, the interference has been the most critical issue that practically limits the performance of overall networks. Furthermore, the distribution of the inter-cell interference (ICI) in conventional cellular networks employing orthogonal frequency-division multiple-access (OFDMA) with quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) tends to approach a Gaussian distribution, which is known to be the worst-case distribution of the ICI as additive noise resulting in poor channel capacity. Thus, a dramatic enhancement of the channel capacity for the cellular network is expected when the ICI could be designed properly so that it has a non-Gaussian distribution. In this context, a cellular OFDMA system with a novel modulation scheme, frequency and quadrature-amplitude modulation (FQAM), is proposed in this paper. The statistical distribution of the ICI is shown to deviate far from the Gaussian distribution for the proposed FQAM-based system. Accordingly, it is shown that the non-Gaussian distribution of the ICI incurred with FQAM results in significantly improved transmission rates for the cell-edge users. Also, from the measurement results using practically implemented FQAM-based OFDMA systems, it is verified that the transmission rate for the cell-edge users could be increased significantly over the conventional QAM-based OFDMA system.