An Overview on Intercell Interference Management in Mobile Cellular Networks: from 2G to 5G

With the unrelenting demand for high bandwidth and high spectrum efficiency, intercell interference (ICI) becomes more and more serious and ICI management plays an increasingly important role in mobile cellular networks. This paper overviews the main ICI management schemes employed in the 2nd generation (2G) to the fourth generation (4G) mobile communication systems, such as the basic frequency reuse-n scheme and power control for 2G and 3G, and enhanced schemes like fractional frequency reuse (FFR), almost blank subframe (ABS) and coordinated multipoint transmission (CoMP) in 4G. These existing ICI management schemes may not be powerful enough for 5G, which is confront with extremely serious ICI given its ultra dense network (UDN) topology. Therefore, promising advanced ICI management schemes are introduced for 5G to manage IC, such as advanced coordinated communication techniques, where coordination is carried out at both the network side and mobile station (MS) side, and advanced air-interface techniques with the potential to mitigate ICI such as orthogonal frequency and code division multiplexing (OFCDM), low-density signature (LDS) spreading and sparse code multiple access (SCMA). Moreover, recent advances in interference alignment (IA) are also discussed.