Identification of inter-cell uplink interferes based on multi-cell scheduling matrix inversion

In this paper, we present a new technique to identify the main inter-cell uplink interferers at each base station of a cellular network simultaneously. In the proposed scheme, for the duration of the interferer identification process, the scheduling of all users to uplink transmission resources is determined by a central controller. The scheduling is carefully chosen so that each cell can determine the contribution of each interferer from measurements of total received interference power by inversion of the interferer scheduling matrix. The advantages of the proposed scheme are as follows. Firstly, it can be adapted to any physical layer and take advantage of a central controller (a widely expected 5G feature). Secondly, it can be operated in both time-division duplex (TDD) and frequency-division duplex (FDD) modes and scales well with the network density. Finally, all the complexity is placed on the base station side, thus reducing the pressure on the user terminal's hardware. The effectiveness of the method is demonstrated mathematically and its performances are investigated by means of Monte-Carlo simulations. Results show that the proposed technique performs as well as the conventional method based on quantized reports of downlink measurements used in LTE-Advanced.