Mobility-aware dynamic inter-cell interference coordination in HetNets with cell range expansion

To encourage traffic offloading from the Macrocell to its overlaid Picocells in a Heterogeneous Network (HetNet), Cell Range Expansion (CRE) has been widely envisioned, enabling more Macro users to be offloaded to the less saturated Picocells, and enhancing the throughput performance of the entire system. By doing so, users in the Picocell expanded area may experience high interference from the Macrocell Base Station (MBS). This effect is mitigated by enhanced Inter-Cell Interference Coordination (e-ICIC) schemes that reserve part of the MBS bandwidth to those Pico users exclusively. Here, we propose a mobility-aware e-ICIC scheme which turns-off some of the Resource Blocks (RBs) in the Macrocell in function of the mobility behaviour of the range-expanded Pico users, thereby providing an efficient trade-off between Macrocell and Picocell achievable throughputs. Our numerical results confirm that point, and show that our proposed method outperforms reference e-ICIC methods.