Interference management in LTE wireless networks [Industry Perspectives]

With the ever-increasing demand in mobile broadband traffic, driven by new services and the evolution in smart mobile devices, high-speed wireless transmissions have become more urgent a necessity than ever. To fulfill such requirements, 3GPP LTE has emerged as the most dominant fourth generation (4G) wireless technology [1, 2]. By employing advanced technologies such as MIMO, Hybrid ARQ, adaptive modulation and coding, etc, LTE has been proved to be able to achieve unprecedented performance levels. However, the interference, in particular, the inter-cell interference (ICI), may severely deteriorate the performance of cell-edge users i.e., users that suffer from strong ICI from the transmissions in other cells. Therefore, effective interference mitigation strategies are crucial for improving the spectrum efficiency of cell-edge users and thus guarantee ubiquity in users experience throughout the entire network. This short column surveys the major challenges in the ICI mitigation of a LTE network and then discusses a few emerging technological solutions that could address these challenges.