Joint eICIC and dynamic point blanking for energy-efficiency in heterogeneous network

Heterogeneous network has recently been proposed as a promising approach for improving capacity and coverage. A large number of low power nodes will consume a lot of energy, which is not conductive to improve the network Energy Efficiency (EE). In this paper, in order to improve network EE, an energy-efficient time-frequency domain interference coordination algorithm is proposed. Firstly, a novel dynamic point blanking (DPB) scheme is proposed and introduced into almost blank subframe (ABS) scheme, which can dynamically mute the strongest interference of coordinated points in frequency domain. Secondly, an adaptive ABS configuration scheme configures proper ABS ratio and optimal transmission power according to the practical load. To efficiently implement the proposed scheme, a concept of cloud cooperated cellular network (C-HetNet) is introduced where low power pico base stations (BSs) overlaid on a macrocell are connected to cloud radio access network (C-RAN) to operate with the macro BS. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can increase the total network EE excellently while ensuring fairness between macrocells and picocells.