Effectiveness of Almost Sub Frame Approach as Inter Cell Interference Management in LTE-A Macro – Pico Scenario

Heterogeneous networks are promising solutions for enhancing network performance of LTE-A mobile networks by deploying small cells within the area of the serving macro cells. The goal of deploying such networks is to offload data from the congested macro cells towards the small cells. However, cross tier interference is a serious issue, which is introduced due to the transmitted power difference between Macro cell node and small cell node. Hence, cell age users are mainly affected by high power interference originated from Macro node. The paper develops enhanced inter-cell interference coordination using Almost Blank Sub-Frame (ABS) to improve user throughput. This can be achieved by stopping data transmission on in certain sub frame of macro cell while Pico users are scheduled at the same frame. Computer simulation results depict that the performance of Pico cell users is highly degraded, especially for cell edge users. The ABS technique improves cell edge user throughput of Pico cell by 95% and center cell user throughput by 75.25%.