Throughput Estimation Method for Time-Domain Inter-Cell Interference Coordination in LTE-Advanced

Time-domain inter-cell interference coordination, so called eICIC, has been introduced in Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-Advanced) system as a throughput improvement method for heterogeneous network, where a lot of low power nodes (LPNs) are located in the coverage area of high power base station (Marco-BS). eICIC enables Macro-BSs to configure almost blank subframe (ABS), in which Marco-BSs reduce their transmit power or mute data transmission so as to reduce interference to the users served by LPNs. However, the improvement of the overall throughput is affected by the ABS setting. This paper proposes a novel user throughput estimation method for LTE-Advanced system where ABS and proportional fairness scheduler are applied. Numerical results show that the proposed method accurately estimates the user throughput for arbitrary ABS ratio with the estimation error of 1-7% for cell edge user throughput and around 1% for average user throughput, respectively. As a result, using the proposed method, Macro-BSs can decide proper ABS ratio to maximize cell edge or average user throughput.