Experimental Evaluation of Interference Suppression Receivers and Rank Adaptation in 5G Small Cells

Advanced receivers are a key component of the 5th Generation (5G) ultra-dense small cells concept given their capability of efficiently dealing with the ever-increasing problem of inter-cell interference. In this paper, we evaluate the potential of interference suppression receivers in real network scenarios using a software defined radio (SDR) testbed. The experimentation is carried out in an indoor office and open hall scenarios. In particular, we study to what extent the interference suppression receiver is an alternative to traditional frequency reuse techniques. To this end we evaluate the Interference Rejection Combining (IRC) and Successive Interference Cancellation (SIC) receivers and different rank adaptation approaches. Each node in our software defined radio (SDR) testbed features a 2×2 MIMO transceiver built with the USRP N200 hardware by Ettus Research. Our experimental results confirm that interference suppression receivers can be a valid alternative to frequency reuse, by achieving nearly the same outage and higher peak throughput performance.