A High Performance Low Complexity Muting Scheme for Interference Coordination

摘要

Modern mobile networks are heterogeneous consisting of a mix of Base Stations (BSs) of different sizes. The interference scenario in such Heterogeneous Networks (HetNets) is very complex and good interference control schemes are needed to make the network cost efficient and ensure good user experience. Interference coordination schemes where selected BSs are muted in some time intervals can ensure that edge users get fair bitrates and good load balancing between small and large cells. However, finding the optimal scheme for muting BSs in a large network is an unsolved problem. In this paper a new method for generating good sets of muting configurations is proposed and its performance evaluated for small networks where the performance of the optimal muting scheme can be found for comparison. The results show that only a small number of muting configurations generated by the new method is needed to achieve a performance within 90% of the maximum achievable. The results of the simulation study also suggest that the muting scheme found by the proposed method has low sensitivity to changes in user and BS positions, indicating that it is sufficient to update the muting scheme at infrequent intervals.