Intra Cell Co-Channel Interference Mitigation in LTE Heterogeneous Network

Abstract

Indoor areas often have poor cellphone reception, especially when the building is made out of concrete. This reception can be improved by deploying small cellphone base stations called femtocells inside the building. The main challenge with deploying these femtocells is interference. Users located near many femtocells, or between the femtocell and the main base station, will see wireless traffic from each of these sources. Existing solutions to this problem divide the wireless spectrum in each cell so that interference is minimized. In this paper, we propose a simple new way of dividing the cell into three areas: the cell center area (CCA), cell middle area (CMA), and cell edge area (CEA). Each region has different frequency allocation policies that result in minimal interference between cells. We compare our method against the strict fractional frequency reuse, soft fractional frequency resuse, and fractional frequency reuse 3 schemes. We find better performance in both single and multi-cell networks.