Radio Resource Management for eICIC, CoMP, Relaying and Back-Hauls Techniques in LTE-Advanced Networks, Concepts and a Literature Survey

Frequency reuse in cells is one of the strategies that LTE uses to maximize the spectrum efficiency. However, it leads to an interference among the cells, especially at the cell edges where the probability for a cell-edge user to be scheduled on a resource block that is being transmitted by the neighbouring cell is high; consequently, the interference is high. In-order to mitigate Inter-Cell Interference, Inter-Cell Interference Coordination was proposed by the Third Generation Partnership Project 3GPP standards for the LTE network, and later on, the enhanced Inter-Cell Interference Coordination was proposed for the LTE-Advanced Heterogeneous Network deployments. Another technique that was proposed by the 3GPP for the LTE-Advanced network that can reduce the Inter-Cell Interference and improve the cell-average and cell-edge user throughput is the Coordinated Multi-Point transmission and reception technique, in which it can increase the cell-average and cell-edge user throughput in both the uplink and downlink transmission by joint scheduling and data processing in multiple cells. Another technique that was proposed by the 3GPP for the LTE-Advanced network that can improve the LTE network coverage in difficult conditions is to deploy Relay Nodes and Back-Hauls. In this paper, we survey the Radio Resource Management of these techniques that are used with LTE-Advanced. We start by explaining the concepts of these techniques. Then, by summarizing the radio resource management approaches that were proposed in the literature for these techniques. And finally, we provide some concluding remarks in the last section.