Radio Resource Management for Eicic, Comp, Relaying and Back-hauls Techniques in LTE-advanced Networks: Concepts and a Literature Survey

Abstract

Frequency reuse in cells is one of the strategies that LTE (Long Term Evolution) uses to maximize the spectrum efficiency. However, it leads to an interference among the cells, especially at the cell edges where the probability for a cell-edge user to be scheduled on a resource block that is being transmitted by the neighbouring cell is high; consequently, the interference is high. In-order to mitigate Inter-Cell Interference (ICI), Inter-Cell Interference Coordination (ICIC) was proposed by the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) standards for the LTE network, and later on, the enhanced Inter-Cell Interference Coordination (eICIC) was proposed for the LTE-Advanced network. ICIC reduces cell-edge interference on traffic channels from neighbouring cells by the use of three interference reduction schemes that works in the power and frequency domain, and they are based on lowering the power of some channels to limit their reception to the users that are close to the base station, and by reducing the chance of frequency overlap. eICIC was proposed to handle ICI in Heterogeneous Network (HetNet) deployments. It reduces the interference on both the traffic and control channels. It uses power, frequency and also time domain to mitigate intra-frequency interference in HetNets. Another technique that was proposed by the 3GPP for the LTE-Advanced network that can reduce the ICI and improve the cell average and cell-edge user throughput is the Coordinated Multi-Point (CoMP) transmission/reception technique. CoMP can increase the cell average and cell edge user throughput in both the uplink and downlink transmission by joint scheduling and data processing in multiple cells/eNBs. Another technique that was proposed by the 3GPP for the LTE-Advanced network that can improve the LTE network coverage in difficult conditions is to deploy Relay Nodes (RNs). In this paper, we survey Radio Resource Management (RRM) for some of the techniques that are used with LTE-A. The included techniques in this paper are; the ICIC, eICIC, CoMP, Relaying and Back-hauls. We start by explaining the concepts of these techniques. Then, by summarizing the radio resource management approaches that were proposed in the literature for these techniques. And finally, we provide some concluding remarks in the last section.