Experimental Verification of Interference Mitigation Techniques for 5G Small Cells

Inter-cell interference is the main performance limiting factor in the dense deployment of small cells targeted by the upcoming 5th Generation (5G) radio access technology. In this paper, we present an experimental evaluation of inter-cell interference mitigation techniques in a real indoor office deployment with four cells, where each cell features one Access Point (AP) and one User Equipment (UE). In particular, we compare traditional Frequency Reuse Planning (FRP) with the recently proposed Maximum Rank Planning (MRP) technique, which relies on the degrees of freedom offered by the multi-antenna transceivers for suppressing a number of interfering streams. Different receiver types are also considered, namely Interference Rejection Combining (IRC) and the interference unaware Maximum Ratio Combining (MRC). Each node in our software defined radio (SDR) testbed features a 2 x 2 MIMO transceiver built with the USRP N200 hardware by Ettus Research. The experimental results in a fully loaded network reveal the capability of the MRP technique to achieve higher throughput performance than FRP for 90% of the cases when IRC receivers are used. Lower network loads lead to further performance improvements for MRP.