Interference Mitigation Using Coordinated Backhaul Timing Allocation for LTE-Advanced Relay Systems

This paper proposes an inter-cell co-channel interference (CCI) mitigation method with the mixed deployment of evolved NodeBs (eNBs) and relay nodes (RNs) for Long Term Evolution (LTE)-Advanced systems studied in the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). Supporting RNs for LTE-Advanced can increase coverage in areas without service, and also improve system capacity. Although RNs can improve system capacity by reusing identical frequency bands in macro and relay cells, this also causes additional CCI. To deal with this issue, we investigated three methods of mitigating CCI by differentiating the backhaul resource allocation timing among eNBs and RNs. Then, we evaluated these methods with a system level simulator. This confirmed improvement of both the received signal-to-interference ratio plus noise power patio (SINR) at user equipment (UE) and system capacity.