Adaptive muting ratio in enhanced Inter-Cell Interference Coordination for LTE-A systems

Heterogeneous network deployment is one of the key issues of future Long Term Evolution Advanced systems. However, the coexistence of high power macro-cells and low power femto-cells leads to co-channel interference problems that must be suitably counteracted. Enhanced Inter-Cell Interference Coordination allows a joint management of the resources among the cells so as to reduce the interference. The behaviour of this approach depends on the choice of some parameters, and in particular on the Almost Blank Subframes muting ratio. This paper proposes a simple approach to determine adaptively the most suitable value of the muting ratio as a function of the network traffic load, based on suitable threshold values. The performance is given in terms of network throughput percentage gain.