Dynamic time-domain resource allocation in heterogeneous small cell networks based on bursty traffic

To further improve spectrum efficiency, small cell is regarded as a promising approach by the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) framework. However, when small cells are co-channel deployed with macro cells, interference is an inevitable problem and severely restricts the system performance. In order to maximize the offloading benefits of small cells and mitigate the interference from the macro cell tier to the small cell tier, cell range expansion (CRE) and almost blank subframes (ABS) have been designed for small cells and macro cells, respectively. In this paper, a reference signal received quality (RSRQ) based offloading strategy is investigated. Based on bursty traffic load, each macro cell decides its ABS pattern distributedly. Moreover, a new scheduling policy is proposed to deal with staggered ABS patterns in adjacent macro cells. System-level simulation results could verify that compared with traditional fixed CRE bias and ABS operations, our proposed scheme can achieve superior performance gains in terms of downlink (DL) and uplink (UL) packet throughput.