Dynamic cell muting for ultra dense indoor small cell deployment scenario

Ultra dense indoor deployment is widely recognized as one of the predominant network configurations of the future wireless systems. Dense indoor deployments are characterized by severe interference between co-channel access points deployed usually in close proximity of one another. Thus the effectiveness and efficiency of interference management techniques is the key to the success of ultra dense indoor deployments. In this study, a representative indoor layout, “Nokia office” is used as an example of an ultra dense indoor deployment scenario for investigating the proper indoor interference management schemes. In this paper, an enhanced Dynamic Coordinated Muting (DCM) scheme is proposed using LTE Rel-11 CoMP framework for ultra dense indoor deployments. Based on interference profile analysis, DCM performance is characterized with varying degrees of feedback overhead and with different types of traffic distributions (symmetric and asymmetric). It is shown that the dynamic coordinated muting scheme can achieve cell edge gains in the range of 55%–96% and mean user throughput gains in the range of 17–28%. The simulation results demonstrate that in certain radio conditions it is also beneficial to consider muting multiple interference sources in the coordinated scheduling algorithm.