Inter-Cell Interference Management in LTE-A Small-Cell Networks

This paper is concerned with inter-cell interference in co-channel Long-Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) small-cell networks (SCNs). A practical SCNs architecture with small-cell group muting (SCGM) is proposed to mitigate the interference between the hosting macro-cell and small-cells as well as interference between adjacent small-cells. Lower power consumption can also be achieved in the proposed architecture. Our system level simulation results show that the proposed solution outperforms today's default operational methods in terms of both macro-cell average and cell-edge throughput.