A dynamic approach for cell range expansion in interference coordinated LTE-advanced heterogeneous networks

Cell range expansion is one of the features of LTE-advanced where low power nodes in a heterogonous network can increase their coverage area and neighboring cells can offload particular users accordingly. The amount of expansion however can differ from one cell to another depending on the location of the low power node with respect to the neighboring cells, the cell load and the method of interference coordination utilized. A study is made in this paper to examine the impact of dynamically changing the range of low power nodes in the presence of a time based ICIC method. A simple heuristic method is proposed which adapts the size of the low power nodes to the load and interference situation. Results show that dynamic range expansion provides better performance for the 5th and 50th percentile users but causes loss to the 95th percentile users of a system.