Efficient interference mitigation for small cell networks with synchronization error

With a rapidly growing demand for high speed data transmissions, small cell networks (SCN) have been shown promising due to its flexible and low-cost deployments. Although SCN can effectively improve the network performance, a dense small cell deployment causes severe co-channel interference. Most of existing interference management methods are proposed under the assumption of perfect synchronization among all cells, which can hardly be achieved in practice. In this study, we studied the interference mitigation between adjacent small cells caused by synchronization errors. A simple but efficient prefix based approach is presented for the SCN to alleviate the performance degradation due to synchronization errors. Simulation results show that the proposed method achieves a noticeable performance gain in terms of both outage probability and average data rate.