Inter-Cell Interference Management in LTE-A Small-Cell Networks

This paper is concerned with inter-cell interference in co-channel Long-Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) small-cell networks (SCNs). A practical SCNs architecture with small-cell group muting (SCGM) is proposed to mitigate the interference between the hosting macro-cell and small-cells as well as interference between adjacent small-cells. Lower power consumption can also be achieved in the proposed architecture. Our system level simulation results show that the proposed solution outperforms today´s default operational methods in terms of both macro-cell average and cell-edge throughput.