Inter-Cell Interference Coordination for Highly Mobile Users in LTE-Advanced Systems

How good is the performance of the existing Inter-Cell Interference Coordination (ICIC) schemes when dealing with users moving at high speeds? In this paper, we evaluate a number of existing schemes under high user mobility conditions. Then, we propose a dynamic decentralized ICIC scheme that requires no apriori frequency planning. The proposed scheme minimizes the amount of data needs to be exchanged among base stations. The scheme uses the Harmony Search (HS) algorithm in order to rapidly generate a more accurate User-to-Channel allocation matrix to cope with high user mobility. In addition, we propose strategies for power control and channel restriction in order to minimize the power consumption and inter-cell interference. A key advantage in the proposed scheme is that its computations are independent of the number of users and cells in the network. Extensive simulations demonstrate that, with a slight degradation in fairness, the proposed scheme provides 18% throughput improvements to edge users without penalizing other users. In addition, the use of the power control and restriction strategies has led to a 22% reduction in power consumption.