UsICIC - A Proactive Small Cell Interference Mitigation Strategy for Improving Spectral Efficiency of LTE Networks in the Unlicensed Spectrum

Mohammad R. Khawer, Jian Tang, Feng Han

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

30 Scopus citations

Abstract

The deployment of long term evolution (LTE) in the unlicensed spectrum (LTE-U) has been gaining significant industry momentum in recent months. The US 5-GHz Unlicensed National Information Infrastructure (UNII) bands that are currently under consideration for LTE deployment in the unlicensed spectrum contain only a limited number of 20 MHZ channels. Thus, in a dense multi-operator deployment scenario, one or more LTE-U small cells have to coexist and share the same 20 MHz unlicensed channel with each other and with the incumbent Wi-Fi. In this paper, we present the scenario and demonstrate that in the absence of an explicit interference mitigation mechanism, there will be a significant degradation in the overall LTE-U system performance for LTE-U cochannel coexistence in countries that do not mandate listen-before-talk (LBT) requirements. We then present the unlicensed spectrum intercell interference co-ordination (usICIC) mechanism as a time-domain multiplexing technique for interference mitigation for the sharing of an unlicensed channel by multioperator LTE-U small cells. Through extensive simulation results, we also demonstrate that our proposed usICIC mechanism will result in 40% or more improvement in overall LTE-U system performance.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number7332800
Pages (from-to)2303-2311
Number of pages9
JournalIEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications
Volume15
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - Mar 2016

Keywords

  • 4G wireless networks
  • LTE-U
  • interference mitigation
  • unlicensed spectrum

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Science Applications
  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering
  • Applied Mathematics

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