Discovery signal design and measurements for small cell DTX in Release 12 LTE

This paper examines an LTE Release 12 discovery signal design and proposes various enhancements for current measurement definitions to more accurately capture the interference level of a frequency layer performing discontinuous transmission (DTX). We evaluated accuracy of the proposed layer selection metric by link-level tools, showed system-level evaluations for a system using a small cell ON/OFF scheme with a discovery signal, and compared the benefits of proposed measurement enhancements against the current system. The results show that considerable cell-edge performance improvements can be achieved with a simple improvement in the frequency layer selection.