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Interference Management Techniques for MultiCell Wireless Networks

Final Report Summary - INTERCELL (Interference management techniques for multicell wireless networks)

Future wireless communication systems will provide a wide range of services at a reasonable cost and sufficient quality of service (QoS) comparable to wireline technologies. In order to satisfy these requirements, the spectral efficient wireless cellular networks are designed by assigning the same frequency to each base station. However, it is well known that it generates intolerable intercell interference and affects the overall system performance. In order to manage this intercell interference, the cooperation between the base stations is a promising solution to improve the overall capacity in multicellular network. The INTERCELL project addresses the development of interference management strategies with reduced rate feedback and capacity constraint backhaul link for next generation wireless cellular networks.

A full cooperation requires exchanging all users' channel state information, as well as their data information, which increases the backhaul load as well as feedback link load. Therefore, the partial cooperative strategies are paid attention by sharing only users' channel state information. By focusing on partial cooperative schemes, we have examined the adaptive resource allocation including user scheduling and power allocation for multicell networks without requiring a centralised unit to eliminate interference coming from other base stations. The amount and quality of feedback information affects significantly the efficiency of wireless communication systems employed interference management and adaptive resource allocation. However, the amount of this feedback increases with the number of users, antennas, base stations and resource blocks. Therefore, it is important to perform a selection at the user side as well as to design limited feedback strategies in cooperative multicell networks.

The INTERCELL project designs energy and spectrally efficient adaptive techniques with reduced feedback load to eliminate interference by exploiting cooperation between the base stations. We have analysed limited feedback algorithms and proposed two different strategies to maximise average sum multicell and to maximise average cell-edge capacity in multicell networks. As a result of the proposed designs, we have improved the capacity of cell edge users with up to 150 % depending on the interference level caused by other base stations. We have analysed the energy efficient strategies for cooperative multicell networks and proposed an interference management technique in a distributed way by employing reduced complexity user scheduling and power minimisation algorithm. Moreover, we have proposed two reduced feedback algorithms by taking into account the information on the users' location and users' QoS. We have reduced the feedback load about 50 % while having the same performance as full feedback in terms of user satisfaction ratio with a small increase on transmitted power.

The INTERCELL examines promising research topics for next generation wireless communication networks to design energy and spectral efficient products. The proposed interference management strategies will guide to implement efficient products for wireless cellular networks while achieving users' demand at a reasonable cost.