Applicability of Interference Coordination in Highly Loaded HSUPA Network

This paper evaluates the performance of highly loaded High Speed Uplink Packet Access (HSUPA) network with and without network wide static Interference Coordination (IC). IC alternates the priorities for user transmission periods throughout the network to achieve reduced interference levels and higher performance. A large variety of combinations including, e.g., different schedulers, cell center/edge user definitions (user splits) and interference targets are investigated in this paper. Performance is analyzed using a quasi-static system level simulator which is also used to support Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) standardization work. The simulator contains detailed and commonly accepted models, for instance, for channel profiles, fading and propagation. The study indicated that IC can bring gain in certain scenarios. However, the gain comes at the expense of fairness leading to users that already have high throughput benefiting from the situation. Moreover, it was shown that the major part of the gain comes from splitting users to different groups and scheduling these groups without any network wide interference coordination.