Intercell Interference Management in an OFDM-based Downlink

Abstract: Efficient radio resource management is of paramount importance for achieving the high bit rates targeted by the 3GPP for the 3GPP Long-Term Evolution. The radio air interface must be able to provide both high peak bit rates and acceptable cell-edge bit rates. This thesis therefore investigates three methods which try to combine the peak bit rate of a reuse-1 system with the cell-edge bit rate of a reuse-3 system in an OFDM-based downlink. These methods are soft frequency reuse, reuse partitioning and one variation of soft frequency reuse, reuse-1 with prioritization. In static simulations with one user per cell and a system load of 100 percent, a Shannon capacity gain of up to 18 percent at the 10th percentile is shown with reuse partitioning compared to a reuse-1 system. This gain comes coupled with a loss of only 5 percent at the median. Soft frequency reuse is also investigated statically and shows a 13 percent gain at the 10th percentile compared to a reuse-1 system. Having a lower 10th percentile gain than reuse partitioning, it also shows a slightly smaller loss of 4 percent at the median and a much smaller loss at the 90th percentile. Dynamic simulations with a traffic model and multiple users per cell offer a more realistic scenario and show that the proposed intercell interference management methods do not provide the same throughput gains in the dynamic case at low system loads. If interference is not an issue, interference coordination is still costly in terms of limiting bandwidth and/or decreasing the scheduling gain, but provides no significant interference reduction. At low system loads, reuse-1 is therefore the best scheme although interference coordination might prove necessary to provide edge-user throughput at high loads. For such purposes, soft frequency reuse is shown to be a potential candidate and although not investigated in a dynamic setting, reuse partitioning is believed to have similar performance. The traffic model chosen in this thesis only allows study of low system loads but at these loads, soft frequency reuse performs promisingly close to a reuse-1 system.