User-centric intercell interference coordination in small cell networks

Small cell networks provide an effective way to meet the explosive growth of mobile data traffic, which, however, complicates the network structure and makes intercell interference management more challenging. One existing interference management approach is to divide the whole network into disjoint clusters, with base stations (BSs) within each cluster doing interference coordination, but the performance will then be limited by the cluster edge users. In this paper, a novel intercell interference coordination method is proposed from the user's point of view. Each mobile user will request some neighboring BSs for interference avoidance, which is based on the relative distance between the home BS and the interfering BSs, called as the interference coordination (IC) range. In this way, the most critical interfering sources for each user can be suppressed, and thus there will be no edge user. We derive an accurate approximation for the successful transmission probability of a typical user with the proposed interference coordination method, based on which the optimal IC range can be obtained. Simulation results demonstrate a significant performance gain for the proposed method, and also show that it outperforms the existing BS clustering method.