Power allocation for the PDCCH in LTE: A way to increase its capacity in realistic deployments

In Long Term Evolution (LTE), the provision of Quality of Service (QoS) strongly depends on the efficiency with which control resources are allocated. Unfortunately, the design of the control channel, the Physical Downlink Control Channel (PDCCH), is not flexible enough to support Intercell Interference Coordination (ICIC) and hence, its degradation at cell edges (a well known issue in LTE) severely jeopardizes system performance. This problem acquires especial relevance in realistic large scale deployments where Signal to Interference plus Noise Ratio (SINR) distributions are much worse than the ones predicted by means of hexagonal layouts. Thus, this paper investigates the challenge of improving SINR levels at cell edges in order to enhance the performance of the PDCCH. The proposed scheme adjusts the power allocated to the PDCCH at each cell in order to improve SINR distributions (minimizing the usage of control resources) and, due to its multiobjective nature, it considers several perspectives of the problem. The results show that gains in the order of 25% can be obtained in severely interfered cells while overall energy savings are around 50%.