Interference Avoidance Using TDMA-Beamforming in Location Aware Small Cell Systems

Abstract

It is ascertained that the current communication systems will not be able to support the future network demands due to the increasing traffic, limitation of frequency resources, and high level of interference. Recently, beamforming techniques have been introduced to reduce the interference by redirecting the transmission towards the desired users only. While such beamforming enables better interference mitigation and improved network performance, the concerns on its effectiveness in dense deployment environments are arising. In this paper, the prospect of interference avoidance in location aware small cell environments using time division multiple access (TDMA) and beamforming is studied. The interference is reduced by identifying the aggressor small cell and transmit the beams towards the desired users at different times. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme is able to enhance the signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) by approximately 18 dB, enhance the user throughput by about 10 Mbps in comparison to small cell on/off control scheme with a discovery signal (SCon/off-DS), and improve the fairness index to about 95% in comparison to the baseline scheme. It is believed that the presented results promote the proposed scheme as an efficient interference management paradigm for the fifth generation (5G) communication systems.

Keywords

• beamforming
• interference management
• throughput
• fairness index, small cell networks