Inter-Cell and Intra-cell Interference Coordination in Cellular Networks with Highly-Sectored Base Stations

The ever increasing demand on mobile service providers to support high rate applications has prompted the development of OFDM based 4G networks. To meet the rising demand, aggressive reuse of the frequency spectrum and the use of smaller cell sizes will be implemented. This will result in an increase in the interference levels in multi-cell OFDMA networks, especially inter-cell interference. Inter-cell interference can severely degrade system throughput, particularly for cell-edge users.;In this thesis, we tackle the inter-cell interference problem by means of an ICIC radio resource scheduling algorithm that aims to improve the cell-edge performance without degrading the overall cell throughput. Conventional scheduling schemes aim to maximize the network throughput; such schemes overlook cell-edge users in scheduling who tend to suffer from bad radio conditions. We consider a recently proposed ICIC scheme which integrates the rate deprived (cell-edge) users in the problem formulation; we implement the scheme in a network in a multi-sectored cells with up to 12 sectors per cell. Coordinated scheduling transmission takes place by coordinating transmission internally between sectors within the same base station (intra-cell), and externally, between neighboring base stations (inter-cell). The use of a multi-sectored base station combined with the aggressive frequency reuse generates a lot of interference in the system but with the coordinated scheduling scheme proposed, we were able to see significant improvement to both network and cell-edge throughput.;To counter the effects of inter-cell interference, interference mitigation techniques are used and one of those techniques is inter-cell interference coordination (ICIC). ICIC can be regarded as a form of CoMP (Coordinated Multi-point Transmission) and it is used to collectively schedule transmissions among several base stations to manage the level of interference in the network.