Study of inter-cell interference and its impact on the quality of video conference traffic in LTE Network

Abstract: While inter-cell interference coordination (ICIC) for the downlink and uplink of multi-cell systems (in general) and orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) networks (in particular) have been extensively studied, the study of the impact caused by inter-cell interference with video conferencing traffic has received less attention. The consideration of video conferencing traffic is essential for analyzing the overall performance analysis of inter-cell interference in LTE networks, and in particular for the evaluation of the video conferencing traffic. In LTE networks, the same frequencies can be used in several adjacent cells. This means that in practice every cell may have other cell nearby whose radio transmissions may interfere with the own signal. In this paper, we report a comprehensive analysis on the performance of video traffic considering the inter-cell interference impact in LTE network. The interference patterns are configured by using the OPNET simulator for a given set of parameters, such as cell configuration, user configurations, and traffic models. The interference pattern is used to study the performance of video conferencing traffic in LTE network for realistic deployments. We, present a detailed description of the way to model the network in OPNET platform considering the inter-cell interference. In order to use the suggested network model in OPNET platform three network scenarios are configured. They are fully overlapped, half overlapped and no frequency overlapping. These scenarios are configured in such a way to show how the video traffic is impacted when the network load increases. The thesis shows that the video conferencing traffic experiences more delay and loss when fully overlapped frequency is used in the adjacent cell on LTE network.