Study of Dynamic eICIC in a Realistic Urban Deployment

In this paper, we investigate the operation of eICIC in a realistic deployment based on site specific data from a dense urban European capital area. Rather than the classical semi-static and common network-wide configuration, the importance of having highly dynamic and distributed mechanisms that are able to adapt to local environment conditions is revealed. We propose a promising opportunistic cell association algorithm and a generalized method for fast muting adaptation. The performance results show that the traditional semi-static eICIC configuration leads to modest gains in realistic deployments, whereas the set of proposed fast dynamic eICIC algorithms leads to capacity gains on the order of 35-120% depending on the local environment characteristics. In the analysis of the performance results for the site specific use case, it is furthermore highlighted how those deviate from typical findings from 3GPP standardized HetNet scenarios.