Fast muting adaptation for LTE-A HetNets with Remote Radio Heads

Enhanced Intercell Interference Coordination (eICIC) techniques boost the performance of co-channel deployments of macro and small cells. However, features like the Almost Blank Subframes (ABS) are intended to be semistatically configured, due to the limited amount of information and the intrinsic delay over the X2 inter-cell interface. In this paper we investigate dynamic solutions for the allocation of the muted resources with small cells in the form of Remote Radio Heads (RRH), connected to the macro cell through a low latency interface. A simple eICIC framework for intercell Radio Resource Management in macro-RRH cases is developed. Based on minimal information collection, we propose an algorithm that adjusts the ABS ratio on a fast basis, aiming at balancing the instantaneous load betweeen the macro and the RRH layer. Performance results with bursty traffic and low and high load conditions show that the dynamic algorithm provides gains of 40-50% both in 5%-ile and 50%-ile user throughput compared to the semi-static case.