On Enhancing Almost Blank Subframes Management for Efficient eICIC in HetNets

Heterogeneous Networks (HetNets) have been a crucial point in the evolution of mobile networks that boost the network performance with the addition of small cells. The use of Enhanced ICIC (eICIC) techniques such as Almost Blank Subframes (ABS) has been introduced in HetNets to protect the small cells from high interferences. However this is done at the expense of lower macrocell user capacities. In this respect, in this work we propose a solution that starts from the principles of ABS and exploits jointly the dimensions of frequency, power and time in order to balance the trade-off between interference mitigation on the small cells and capacity degradation in the macrocells. Comparisons against the classical ABS and other existing solutions show the efficiency of the proposed scheme with improvements in the user capacity that reach up to 26% in the considered scenarios. This is achieved without significant degradation of the performance observed by small cell users.