Performance Evaluation of Interference Mitigation Techniques in 4G Networks in Mobile Environments

Abstract

Intercell Interference (ICI) is one of the major factors that limit the performance and Quality of Service (QoS) of 4G wireless networks (Long Term Evolution/LTE-Advanced). For this reason, heterogeneous networks present an attractive solution for the improvement of mobile network’s services to provide better data rates and coverage. So, a key scheme in 4G traffic processing is the interference mitigation techniques. In the present work, we propose a model while optimizing the simulation parameters of three well-known ICI mitigation algorithms, namely Soft Frequency Reuse (SFR), Distributed Fractional Frequency Reuse (DFFR) and Strict Frequency Reuse (Strict FR). Here, mobile users are considered to be moving at high speed (300 Km/h: speed allowed by the LTE/LTE-A standards). We provide a simulation framework that is suitable for the parameters of the 4G system in terms of cells number and inter-eNodeB distance for an LTE/LTE-A network deployed in an urban area. Subsequently, we compare our proposed model with the aforementioned algorithms in terms of throughput, Signal-to-Interference-plus-Noise-Ratio (SINR) and Spectral efficiency by using the NS3 open source simulator. Results prove the efficiency of the proposed model in condensed area of mobile users compared to previous works that evaluated and tested immobile scenarios.