Distributed uplink intercell interference control in heterogeneous networks

Heterogeneous cellular networks which consist of macrocells and small cells can offer significant capacity gain by utilizing the resources of the small cells. However, to achieve this, the interference between the macrocells and the small cells must be carefully managed. In this work, we propose an uplink intercell interference control (ICIC) scheme which is a unified ICIC approach of handover based interference control and rate-split based interference control. The handover based interference control scheme is a win-win strategy which enhances both interfering user's rate and interfered user's rate. On the other hand, the rate-split based interference control scheme is a yield-win strategy where an interfering user sacrifices his rate to save the interfered user's rate. In this paper, we assume that users have their target QoS such as minimum rate when they send their data. The proposed uplink ICIC scheme reduces the interference as best as possible while it guarantees the minimum QoS. Simulation results shows that the proposed ICIC scheme offers enhanced rate or fairness than legacy ICIC schemes which are not considering user QoS. The proposed ICIC scheme works in distributed manner with low-complexity so that it can be applied to self-organizing network and mobile ad-hoc networks as well as heterogeneous cellular networks.