A dynamic almost blank subframe scheme for video streaming traffic model in heterogeneous networks

Abstract

In heterogeneous network (HetNet), the coverage area of picocell is small due to transmission power difference between macro eNodeB (eNB) and pico eNB. As a result, the traffic load is distributed unequally which yields to macrocell overloading. In order to overcome this issue, cell range expansion (CRE) technique has been proposed. However, the CRE approach can affect the downlink signal quality of the offloaded users and then these users experience high downlink interference from macro eNB on their control and data channels. Therefore, such inter-cell interference coordination (ICIC) techniques are needed to realize the promised capacity and coverage. Enhanced ICIC (eICIC) is a time domain technique to mitigate interference in HetNets using almost blank subframes (ABSs). However, the static ABS value cannot support the dynamic changing of network conditions. In this paper, a dynamic ABS scheme is proposed based on Genetic Algorithm to find the best ABS value and ABS locations in a frame to mitigate interference problem between macrocell and picocells for video streaming traffic model. Exhaustive simulation results show that the proposed scheme can improve the system performance in terms of throughput, outage probability and delay.