Performance evaluation of inter-cell interference of LTE-A system using carrier aggregation and CoMP techniques

Long Term Evolution Advanced (LTE-A) is a promising technology to achieve peak data rate of up to 1 Gbit/s in the downlink and 500 Mbit/s in the uplink. Because adjacent cells employs the same frequency in universal frequency reuse scheme, interference between adjacent cells may degrade the bit rate, particularly at the cell edges. Inter-Cell Interference Coordination (ICIC) based on carrier aggregation as well as Coordinated Multipoint (CoMP) transmission and reception techniques have been considered as promising techniques to overcome the interference problem and to improve the bit rate at the cell edges. ICI problem can be mitigated by using different arrangements of frequency-bands allocations and possibly with different transmission power, distinguishing between the cell centre and the cell edge users. In this paper, mitigation of inter-cell interference using carrier aggregation (CA) and coordinated multipoint (CoMP) techniques are evaluated through computer simulaton. The simulation employs different frequency allocation schemes, fractional frequency reuse, different transmission powers, and different radio resource scheduling algorithms to evaluate and to enhance cell edge performance, bandwidth efficiency and throughput. The performance is evaluated in terms of SINR as a function of the number of femtocell users, and the separation distance from interfering cells. The performance is then compared between conventional technique, CA technique and the combined CA and CoMP techniques.