Impact of Enhanced Inter-Cell Interference Coordination on Heterogeneous Network Topology in LTE-A Using Cell Range Extension

Abstract

Recently, wireless data traffic is growing exponentially due to innovative wireless devices such as smart phones, tablets, and machine-to-machine communications and so on. 3GPP introduces LTE release-8 as first standard and continues further research to introduce LTE-A for network improvement having those innovative devices and services in mind. As far as LTE-A is concerned, Heterogeneous Networks are introduced to improve network performance by deploying small cells over the coverage area of the serving Macro cells. The essential target of deploying such a small cell is to offload the users from the congested Macro cells towards the small cells. Small cell covers only limited areas due to low transmit power. To increase coverage and capacity of small cell, cell range extension was introduced in this research. Cell range extension boosts received signal power of small cell users by adding positive offset bias. Computer simulations are carried out following the developed analytical frameworks. The simulation results validates that deploying small cell over Macro cell improves user and cell throughput.