Cell identification based on enhanced icic for heterogeneous networks in LTE-A systems

The User Equipment (UE) must first do cell identification when wishing to access a Long Term Evolution (LTE) cell. As a host of Low Power Nodes (LPN) is overlaid by a Macro cell and the unbalanced transmitting power exits between different cell layers in the heterogeneous networks, the control channels would suffer more severe interference than in the case of homogeneous networks. This makes cell edge users identifying LPN more difficultly. This paper gives a time domain solution for enhanced Inter-Cell Interference Coordination (elCIC) which can efficiently mitigate the strong interference in control channel by muting the Macro cell transmission in some of its sub-frames, and analyses how the Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) elCIC techniques assist cell identification when suffering serious interference from the Macro cell, and then presents link level simulations on the cell identification performance for legacy Release 8/Release 9 terminals in this condition, and proposes the sufferable interference level for cell identification performance.