Performance Evaluation of Pico-cell Range Expansion with Interference Mitigation using Smart Antenna

Abstract

In Long Term Evolution-Advanced heterogeneous networks, pico-eNBs are added to existing macro cells networks that contain macro eNBs in order to offload traffic from macro layer and bring users closer to the picoeNBs to enhance the cell edge user experience. Moreover, Cell Range Expansion (CRE) is a way to increase the percentage of users that associate to pico BSs which leads to reduce the imbalance traffic load between cells .However, there is strong interference which is caused by macro-eNB to pico cell edge users due to its higher transmission power. Hence, inter-cell interference is the biggest challenge in LTE-A HetNets. In order to further reduce the macro interference while using the CRE approach, the smart antenna is combined with CRE to improve system performance using features of both techniques. The simulation results using Matlab show that system performance could be enhanced when smart antenna is used. This enhancement could be presented by significant improvement on SINR by 24% which leads to 3.41% higher capacity with slight reduction on number of outage users that makes more than 50% improvement on throughput that give rise of 57% enhancement on spectral efficiency.