An adaptive ABS-CoMP scheme in LTE-Advanced Heterogeneous Networks

As one of the key technical challenges in long term evolution (LTE)-Advanced heterogeneous networks (HetNets) is intercell interference coordination, many different schemes, such as coordinated multipoint (CoMP) and almost blank subframe (ABS) schemes, have been proposed in this field. Different cells are pushed to cooperate to eliminate intercell interference in CoMP coordinated beamforming, but performance is heavily dependent on the quality of channels. ABS schemes allow high-power cells to transmit almost blank subframes, and avoid interference with low-power cell edge users, which will in turn result in reduced high-power cell throughput as cost. An adaptive ABS-CoMP scheme in an LTE-Advanced HetNet is proposed, which combines both the ABS and CoMP coordinated beamforming schemes to eliminate intercell interference, and adaptive transmits signals in different ways. It is assumed to improve system throughput and mitigate signaling overhead and computational complexity. The results from simulations demonstrated that the proposed scheme outperformed the ABS and CoMP schemes, and achieved considerable system throughput gains in Config.4b scenarios defined by 3GPP.