Joint ABS power and resource allocations for eICIC in heterogeneous networks

Heterogeneous networks (HetNets) are expected to be one of the major performance enhancement enablers of LTE-Advanced. In order to protect pico-UEs from the strong macro interference, the macro eNBs need to reduce the transmission power during protected subframes instead of suspending data transmission introduced in 3GPP Release 10, scheduling strictly users in the vicinity of the macro eNBs. In this paper, based on low power (LP) almost blank subframes (ABS), we study a joint optimization of power allocation of ABS (called dynamic LP-ABS) and resource allocation to maximize the total throughput. The proposed algorithm takes into account the power allocation of ABSs in the marco eNB, the ABS partition and the UE association in all cells. Simulation results show that dynamic LP-ABS can effectively increase system throughput compared to the fixed LP-ABS and zero-ABS.