Study on link-level simulation in multi-cell LTE downlink system

Simulation of wireless communication system is usually divided into system-level and link-level. Link-level simulation is generally used to simulate the point-to-point physical layer technologies with propagation model taken into account, which means it is based on single-cell and single terminal scenario. Multi-cell model is not often studied in link-level mainly due to its high complexity. So we usually consider the impact of Gaussian white noise with fading in link-level simulation but ignore the impact of interference from other cells. This paper brings a new perspective of link-level simulation for long term evolution (LTE) system under multi-cell scenario. By analyzing downlink interference in multi-cell, we demonstrate the interference power is no longer flat in frequency domain, and the correlation between interference is affected by cell IDs. So we believe that link-level simulation under multi-cell is more significant for evaluation of a practical system, especially for its control channel. We take LTE downlink control channel as an example, and propose a new method for link-level simulation in multi-cell scenario. The simulation results confirm our analysis.