Performance study of MRC and IRC weights in LTE/LTE-A systems with interference management

An inter-cell interference coordination (ICIC) technique that recently has attracted interest is to create protected subframes to reduce inter-cell interference. This technique can under some circumstances lead to almost blank subframes (ABS) where there is interference only on the pilots but no interference on the data. This paper analyzes the performance of traditional MRC and IRC receivers for ABS subframes both analytically and through simulations. It is found that IRC often yields better performance than MRC even in the absence of interference on data making the IRC receiver an attractive receiver in practice.