Managing inter-cell interference with advanced receivers and rank adaptation in 5G small cells

The use of receivers with interference suppression capabilities is expected to be a significant performance booster in 5th Generation (5G) ultra-dense small cell networks. In this respect, they could represent an alternative to traditional frequency reuse techniques, facilitating the inter-cell interference management. In this paper, we evaluate whether it is possible to rely on such advanced receivers as the main tool to deal with the inter-cell interference problem. We present a system-level performance evaluation in three different dense indoor small cell scenarios using a receiver model that includes both interference rejection combining (IRC) and successive interference cancellation (SIC) principles, as well as different rank adaptation strategies. Our results confirm that interference suppression receivers with a supportive system design can indeed represent a valid alternative to frequency reuse. They achieve similar outage data rate performance in comparison to reuse strategies (resource orthogonalization), but higher average and peak throughput.