Small Cell Interference Management

The deployment of small cells such as pico cells and micro cells poses new challenges. The use of interference mitigation techniques, therefore, plays an important role when deploying small cells to fully maximize the benefits of such investments. Resource partitioning in the time and/or frequency domain is an option, where especially coordinated time‐domain muting between macro and/or small cells has gained significant interest and is used for enhanced inter‐cell interference coordination (elCIC) and coordinated multipoint (CoMP) or enhanced CoMP (eCoMP) as will be explained in this chapter. One example of joint network‐ and UE‐based interference mitigation is eICIC. The chapter shows the packet scheduling solutions for interference mitigation. One of the main objectives of long‐term evolution (LTE) scheduler is to avoid inter‐cell interference at the cell edge. The frequency‐selective scheduler (FSS) is the main component in the packet scheduler, and the chapter analyses the FSS solution in more detail.