• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
• /
• v.39A no.5
• /
• pp.280-292
• /
• 2014

Recently, heterogeneous networks consisting of small-cells on top of traditional macro-cellular network has attracted much attention, because traditional macro-cellular network is not suitable to support more demanding mobile data traffic due to its limitation of spatial reuse. However, due to the transmit power difference between macro- and small-cells, most users are associated with macro-cells rather than small-cells. To solve this problem, enhanced inter-cell interference coordination (eICIC) has been introduced. Particularly, in eICIC, the small-cell coverage is forcibly expanded to associate more users with small-cells. Then, to avoid cross-tier interference from macro-cells, these users are allowed to receive the data during almost blank subframe (ABS) in which macro-cells almost remain silent. However, this approach is not sufficient to balance the load between macro- and small-cells because it only expands the small-cell coverage. In this paper, we propose a load balance scheme improving proportional fairness for heterogeneous networks employing eICIC. In particular, the proposed scheme combines the greedy-based user association and the ABS rate determination in a recursive manner to perform the load balance.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
• /
• v.38A no.3
• /
• pp.268-276
• /
• 2013

In this paper, we introduce the technologies to handle the interference in the heterogeneous network and evaluate the performance of enhanced Inter-Cell Interference Coordination (enhanced ICIC, eICIC) techniques that are being introduced in 3GPP Release 10. In the time-domain eICIC scheme, time-domain resources are scheduled to avoid the interference by using Almost Blank Subframe (ABS) and Cell Range Expansion (CRE). To mitigate the cross-tier interference between macro and femtocell, it is important to efficiently combine the ABS and CRE in heterogeneous network. Since it is hard to evaluate the total throughput of heterogeneous network numerically, we evaluate the total throughput by using system level simulation (SLS). As a result of evaluation, the throughputs of many different cases of combination of ABS and CRE are compared.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
• /
• v.51 no.6
• /
• pp.9-17
• /
• 2014

Heterogeneous network (HetNet) is a network consisting of macrocells overlaid with small cells. In HetNet, the interference from macrocell to small cell users is a major cause of performance degradation of small cell users and enhanced inter-cell interference coordination (eICIC) is needed to mitigate the interference. Previous works on eICIC gives limited performance gain because these works focus on maximizing long-term throughput and rarely consider varying channel conditions over frames. This paper proposes a new algorithm which dynamically coordinates interference and schedules users on each frame to maximize the total utility of the network with lower computational complexity than exhaustive search. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm achieves higher total throughput than the throughput with the conventional algorithm, and has higher fairness index than the conventional algorithm when there large number of users.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
• /
• v.40 no.7
• /
• pp.1424-1432
• /
• 2015

As the wireless communication technologies are being studied for application to maritime communication networks in a fusion of marine industries and IT technology, interference coordination techniques have been studied in the maritime heterogeneous networks. In this paper, we develop a simulator for measuring, verifying and evaluating performance of a maritime heterogeneous network. Unlike other previous simulators, the developed simulator applies enhanced inter-cell interference coordination (eICIC) that are being introduced in the 3GPP Release 10 for mitigating the cross-tier interference between ships. Furthermore, we investigate the effects of almost blank subframes (ABS) and cell range expansion (CRE) on the throughput of small cells in maritime heterogeneous networks by using the developed simulator.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
• /
• v.39A no.9
• /
• pp.548-556
• /
• 2014

To cope with recently increasing demand for data traffics, heterogeneous networks have been actively studied, where small cells are deployed within a macro cell coverage with the same frequency band. To mitigate the interference from the macro cell to small cells, an enhanced Inter-cell Interference Coordination (eICIC) technique has been proposed, where ABS (Almost Blank Subframe) is used in time domain. However, there is a waste of resource since no data is transmitted in a macro-cell in ABS. In this paper, we propose a new interference management method by using a 3D sector beam based on Active Antenna System (AAS), where Genetic Algorithm (GA) is applied to reduce the antenna gain toward a small-cell. With the proposed scheme, the macro-cell and small cells can transmit data at the same time with the AAS antenna pattern generating reduced interference to small cells. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated by using an LTE-Advanced system level simulator.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
• /
• v.40 no.12
• /
• pp.2381-2388
• /
• 2015

It has been known that interference occurs between macrocell ans small-cell base stations in a heterogeneous network (HetNet) of LTE-A. For solving this problem, 3GPP suggested eICIC (Enhanced Inter Cell Interference Coordination) that includes ABS (Almost Blank Subframe) and power control. This paper proposes to use ABS with power control and derives an effective ABS ratio as a function of the number of users and HeNBs. Through simulation, we confirm that integration of ABS and power control can mitigate interference than using ABS only. Furthermore, we verify that an effective ABS ratio is different depending on the number of users and HeNBs.

• Information and Communications Magazine
• /
• v.31 no.3
• /
• pp.96-102
• /
• 2014

지난 반세기 동안 전세계 통신 기술은 기지국-셀간 1:1 대응을 기반으로 설계 되고 만들어 졌다. 이에 따라 셀 간 경계에서의 통신 품질 저하는 당연한 현상으로 받아 들여졌다. 이와 같은 전제 하에 무선 경계에서 통신 품질 향상을 목표로 다양한 스케줄링 기법, ICIC, eICIC[1] 등의 간섭 회피 기법등이 연구 되었다. 하지만 이러한 방식은 기지국간 정보 공유의 제한과 delay에 의해서 실용성이 현저히 떨어진다. 이를 극복하기 위해 모든 정보를 공유하는 가상화(cloud) 기술이 대안으로 떠오르고 있다. 현재 국내 통신 사업자인 KT는 LTE통신망에 가상화 기술을 적용하여 세계 최초로 가상화 기반 LTE 통신서비스를 제공하고 있다. 이에 본고에서는 현재 구현되어 있는 가상화 기술과 현황, 앞으로 구현될 기술에 대해서 알아본다.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
• /
• v.38B no.4
• /
• pp.240-246
• /
• 2013

In heterogeneous networks, the almost blank subframes (ABS) for inter-cell interference coordination (ICIC), which can be protected from the CCI due to unutilized subframes (i.e., ABS) is proposed. However, the analytical model for ABS-based systems has not been fully studied yet. In this paper, we derive a new analytical model to evaluate the performance of ABS-based systems. In an analytic model, we assume that each carrier in multicarrier systems, such as in OFDMA, is subject to large-scale fading, which is independent of other carriers. As a performance measure, we present the cumulative distribution function (CDF) for the effective SINR. We show the accuracy of the analytical model via simulation results.