Validation of an Inter-Cell Interference Coordination Solution in Real-World Deployment Conditions

The characteristics of the deployment scenario are fundamental elements in the performance evaluation of wireless networks inter-cell interference coordination (ICIC) schemes. The statistical validation of such concepts is typically achieved by means of system-level simulation campaigns where regular reference scenarios and stochastic channel models are employed. It is an important next step to verify that the trends observed in the reference scenarios compare equally well in more practical deployments. For such comparison, it is required to evaluate an extensive set of link conditions, reflecting the many possible configurations that can be experienced in a practical scenario. In this paper we adopt an experimental procedure, using a software defined radio testbed, for acquiring almost 1000 different radio link conditions between the nodes of a relevant wireless indoor network scenario. The acquired measurements, were used as input to a system level simulator in order to evaluate the performance of a local area decentralized ICIC scheme. The obtained performance results highlight the contribution of the selected scheme and provide a new insight for the validation of the related simulation-based studies, previously published in literature.