Increasing Reliability by Means of Root Cause Aware HARQ and Interference Coordination

The arrival of mission critical applications in the context of vehicular, medical and industrial wireless communications calls for reliability constraints never seen before in cellular systems. Enhanced Inter-Cell Interference Coordination (eICIC) has been widely investigated in the context of LTE-A Heterogeneous Networks, but always with load balancing and resource partitioning purposes. Given the broad range of new use cases targeting ultra high reliability, we propose the use of on-demand eICIC for reducing the BLER of the retransmissions of critical users while minimizing the impact to the rest of the network. Combined with a ROot Cause Aware HARQ (ROCA-HARQ), which provides additional information when a transmission fails, the joint mechanism is relevant for any LTE/LTE-A deployment and can be easily implemented in a real network. System-level simulations show attractive BLER reductions up to 80% with little impact in throughput performance (loss in user throughput below 6%).