Joint interference management and handover optimization in LTE small cells network

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the interaction between two major technical challenges for LTE small cells deployment, in order to face the explosive increase of the traffic growth. These challenges are 1-Inter-Cell Interference Management which becomes critical in dense deployment of small cells and 2-Mobility Management since the handover frequency between close-by cells increases considerably. These two features, often analyzed separately are intertwined. The main reason is that handover occurs in overlapping cellular areas, where interference level is the highest. In this paper, interference is managed by a decentralized approach based on Multi Armed Bandit solutions. Handover performances are evaluated thanks to standard Mobility Robustness Optimization counters. Thus, we evaluate the impact of inter-cell interference management on handover performances and we demonstrate through simulations that the optimal configuration of interference management shall jointly account for performances indicators directly impacted by the interference management mechanism performances like convergence duration and throughput but also for handover-related performance metrics.