Enhancing cell-edge performance: a downlink dynamic interference avoidance scheme with inter-cell coordination

TLDR

Interference management is essential for high‑rate wireless systems that densely reuse spectrum, yet static coordination improves cell‑edge performance at the cost of overall throughput and is ill‑suited for femtocell deployments. This work proposes a dynamic interference‑avoidance scheme that coordinates neighboring cells to protect edge users while preserving network throughput. The scheme employs a two‑level algorithm, with local decisions at each base station and a central controller coordinating a group of neighboring stations. Simulations demonstrate that the approach surpasses static reuse‑1, reuse‑3, and fractional‑frequency‑reuse baselines in edge‑throughput, incurs only a modest throughput penalty, and adds limited complexity.

Abstract

Interference management has been a key concept for designing future high data-rate wireless systems that are required to employ dense reuse of spectrum. Static or semi-static interference coordination based schemes provide enhanced cell-edge performance but with severe penalty to the overall cell throughput. Furthermore, static resource planning makes these schemes unsuitable for applications in which frequency planning is difficult, such as femtocell networks. In this paper, we present a novel dynamic interference avoidance scheme that makes use of inter-cell coordination in order to prevent excessive inter-cell interference, especially for cell or sector edge users that are most affected by inter-cell interference, with minimal or no impact on the network throughput. The proposed scheme is comprised of a two-level algorithm - one at the base station level and the other at a central controller to which a group of neighboring base stations are connected. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the reference schemes, in which either coordination is not employed (reuse of 1) or employed in a static manner (reuse of 3 and fractional frequency reuse), in terms of cell edge throughput with a minimal impact on the network throughput and with some increase in complexity.