Inter-cell interference analysis for OFDM/FBMC systems

Multicarrier communication technologies are promising candidates for 4G wireless access systems. In this paper, we focus on the downlink of multicellular networks and we investigate the influence of the inter-cell interference in an unsynchronized frequency division duplex (FDD) context with a frequency resuse of 1. We compare the conventional orthogonal frequency division multiplexing with cyclic prefix modulation (CP-OFDM) and the filter bank based multi-carrier modulation (FBMC). Two tables modeling the mean interference power are given and show that, in FBMC case, the interference is more localized than in OFDM case. Finally, these tables are used to evaluate performance in terms of average capacity in FBMC multi-cell networks compared to CP-OFDM ones.