To deal with the shrink of Picocell Downlink (DL) coverage areas, the concept of Cell Range Expansion (CRE) has been proposed, in which a positive value is added to the DL Reference Signal Received Power (RSRP) of picocell pilot signals.Although CRE will expand DL picocell footprint, it may also lead to severe DL inter-cell interference from macrocells since some picocell User Equipments (UEs) are not connected to the cells that provide the strongest RSRP. In this paper, we propose a new coordinated interference management scheme for macrocell-picocell Heterogeneous Network (HetNet) to improve the signal quality of picocell UEs. The proposed method is to coordinate frequency and power resources within a set of resource allocation restrictions. Based on the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) standardization, system level simulation results show that compared with alternative approaches, the proposed method can mitigate outages, improve cell-edge UEs' performance and bring a significant increase in overall system throughput.
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