LTE-A femto-cell interference mitigation with MuSiC DOA estimation and null steering in an actual indoor environment

This paper deals with a cognitive approach used to reduce the co-channel interference arising from the coexistence of an LTE macrocell and an LTE femtocell sharing the same frequency band. Multiple-antennas technology is considered to exploit the angle dimension as a new spectrum opportunity: femtocell acts as a secondary system and inserts nulls in the directions of the UE connected to the macrocell thus protecting the downlink transmission of the primary base station. MuSiC algorithm is used to detect the DOA of the UE signal replicas in an indoor environment assuming a variable number of multipath components characterized by a very large angle spread. The proposed scheme permits to increase the signal to interference ratio at the UE side thus reducing the achieved error rate on the downlink connection even when the number of resolvable paths is higher than the number of antennas. Finally the UE mobility is considered to take into account the effect of variable DOAs.