Efficient management of interference and power by jointly configuring ABS and DRX in LTE-A HetNets

Abstract

Long term evolution-advanced (LTE-A) is a mobile communication standard widely used for broadband wireless access. It allows large macrocells and small picocells coexisting in a heterogeneous network (HetNet) to increase throughput and facilitate deployment. To handle signal interference between cells, LTE-A enhances channel quality of picocells by suspending the macrocell’s transmission in an almost blank subframe (ABS). Moreover, LTE-A adopts the discontinuous reception (DRX) method to let a user equipment (UE) adaptively disable its transceiver to save energy. However, existing studies view ABS and DRX as independent methods and address cell interference and energy saving separately. The paper points out that they have much in common, and develops a joint interference and power management (JIPM) mechanism to improve LTE-A performance by integrating ABS and DRX. Based on channel conditions and traffic demands of UEs, JIPM computes the amount of resources given to each UE and adjusts the parameters of ABS and DRX accordingly. Simulation results show that JIPM achieves higher energy efficiency and lower packet dropping of real-time flows, as compared with other schemes.