Intercell interference coordination for the ePDCCH in LTE-advanced macrocellular deployments

Abstract

Abstract—This paper investigates several schemes to improve the performance of the enhanced Physical Downlink Control Channel (ePDCCH) in Long Term Evolution Advanced (LTEA) networks by means of Intercell Interference Coordination (ICIC). Given the flexible design of the ePDCCH, based on frequency division multiplexing, static ICIC techniques such as Soft Frequency Reuse (SFR) can be applied and hence, performance degradations at cell edges can be avoided in contrast to its antecesor, the Physical Downlink Control Channel (PDCCH) in LTE. The study is focused in realistic/irregular deployments, where the amount of intercell interference received at different cells varies considerably making very difficult the task of homogenizing the performance of the ePDCCH over the coverage area. In order to address this problem, the proposed multiobjective scheme adjusts the configuration of SFR at cell level. The problem formulation includes several performance metrics including spectral efficiency, cell edge performance, consumption/ amount of control resources and energy requirements. The results reveal that the proposed scheme is able to (1) reduce the average consumption of control resources and, (2) minimize energy needs without penalizing the capacity of data channels.