Inter-cell interference mitigation in LTE-advanced heterogeneous networks by dynamic subframes assignment guaranteeing fairness

Dense network deployment is an important approach to meet the requirements of the future mobile communications. LTE-Advanced Heterogeneous Networks (HetNets) has been introduced by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) to increase cell throughput, offload data from macro-cell and improve indoor coverage. However, it also brings serious inter-cell interference with the co-channel deployment. Although the Almost Blank Subframes (ABS) scheme, one solution of Enhanced Inter-Cell Interference Coordination (eICIC), mitigates the interference, it results in undesirable fairness, huge difference of users' throughput in the system and even the incapability of communication. To address this problem, we introduce Dynamic Subframes Assignment Guaranteeing Fairness (DSAGF), in which the ABS pattern is set to mitigate inter-cell interference while guaranteeing fairness. As demonstrated in the simulation results, DSAGF significant decline in outage ratios of user equipments, narrowing difference of users' throughput, and improvement for fairness with inter-cell interference mitigation. © 2016 SERSC.