Range Expansion and Inter-Cell Interference Coordination (ICIC) for Picocell Networks

Range expansion (RE), when applied with inter-cell interference coordination (ICIC) may have significant benefits for improving the throughput and fairness of macrocell/picocell networks. In this paper, first, benefits of RE in the uplink and downlink are reviewed, emphasizing its definitive merit for uplink communications. It is shown that while RE also improves the fairness in the downlink, it may seriously degrade the total system capacity if no ICIC is utilized. Then, a novel cell-selection technique that capitalizes on subframe-blanking at the macrocell is introduced for improving the downlink capacity and fairness. System level simulation results show that the proposed cellselection method adaptively achieves a good balance between sum capacity and fairness, and can be used in place of biasbased cell-selection.