Interference Effects of Low-Power Devices on the UE Throughput of a CR-Based LTE System

Abstract

Recently, the use of mobile devices has increased, and mobile traffic is growing rapidly. In order to deal with such massive traffic, cognitive radio (CR) is applied to efficiently use limited-spectrum resources. However, there can be multiple communication systems trying to access the white space (unused spectrum), and inevitable interference may occur to cause mutual performance degradation. Therefore, understanding the effects of interference in CR-based systems is crucial to meaningful operations of these systems. In this paper, we consider a long-term evolution (LTE) system using additional spectra by accessing the TV white space, where low-power devices (LPDs) are licensed primary users, in addition to TV broadcasting service providers. We model such a heterogeneous system to analyze the co-existence problem and evaluate the interference effects of LPDs on LTE user equipment (UE) throughput. We then present methods to mitigate the interference effects of LPDs by ‘de-selecting’ some of the UEs to effectively increase the overall sector throughput of the CR-based LTE system.