Interference management and cell range expansion analysis for LTE picocell deployments

Heterogeneous networks are one of the solutions employed in next generation mobile networks to improve coverage and enhance spectral efficiency. This paper focuses on in-band heterogeneous deployments based on picocells, so interference coordination is necessary in order to increase system capacity. In addition, traditional association methods have to be revised. Several radio resource management and intercell interference coordination schemes are proposed and evaluated in this work. Moreover, to enhance data offloading in picocell deployments, cell range expansion (CRE) techniques have been introduced and the impact of the selected bias values is evaluated in several scenarios.