Smart coordination for small cell enhancement in LTE-Advanced system

In Long Term Evolution Advanced (LTE-A) Release 12 (Rel-12), small cell enhancement (SCE) has been intensively discussed since it could substantially provide capacity boosting and is beneficial for future network, where the requirement of data rate is much higher. In small cell environment, resource and interference coordination are of great importance to exploit the performance gain, especially in dense deployment where the interference among small cells are severe. A smart coordinated method in multiple domains including frequency, time and power is needed to fully exploit the benefit from small cells. This paper proposed smart coordination methods including component carrier (CC) level coordination (frequency domain), transmit subframe (TS) pattern coordination (time domain) and combined method considering both domains. System level simulation proves that the proposed methods could achieve good performance for cell average user throughput without the loss of cell edge user throughput. Meanwhile, the power consumption, scheduling complexity of base station, and requirement of backhaul latency are proved to be eased.