Interference characterization and mitigation benefit analysis for LTE-A macro and small cell deployments

This article presents a characterization of different LTE-Advanced network deployments with regard to downlink interference and resource usage. The investigation focuses on heterogeneous networks (HetNets) with dedicated spectrum for each layer and, in particular, on cases where small cells are densely deployed. Thus, the main interference characteristics of the macro layer and the dense small cell layer are studied separately. Moreover, the potential benefit of mitigating the dominant interferer in such scenarios is quantified as an upper bound gain and its time variability is discussed and evaluated. A dynamic FTP traffic model is applied, with varying amounts of traffic in the network. The results present an uneven use of resources in all feasible load regions. The interference under the dynamic traffic model shows a strong variability, and the impact of the dominant interferer is such that 30% of the users could achieve at least a 50% throughput gain if said interferer were mitigated, with some users reaching a 300% improvement during certain time intervals. All the mentioned metrics are remarkably similar in the macro and small cell deployments, which suggests that densification does not necessarily imply stricter interference mitigation requirements. Therefore, the conclusion is that the same techniques could be applied in both scenarios to deal with the dominant interferer.