Decentralized beamforming with coordinated sounding for inter-cell interference management

This paper presents and evaluates a decentralized beamforming design for inter-cell interference management that is highly recommended in Time Division Duplex (TDD) cellular network deployments and interference limited scenarios. The inter-cell interference mitigation in the downlink (DL) is done in a decentralized manner by sensing the Sounding Reference Signals (SRS) sent by user equipments (UEs) associated to neighboring evolved Node Bs (eNBs). The proposed technique exploits the reciprocity of the propagation radio channels, an adequate link adaptation in the uplink and a wise coordination of the SRS transmissions. In this regard, multiple methods are proposed to implement the proposed Beamforming with Coordinated Sounding (BF-CoS) in a 3GPP LTE-Advanced based network. Simulation results show significant performance gains in terms of user packet throughput with respect to no coordination schemes, without increasing the overhead and complexity because of coordination. The largest relative gains are obtained for mediumto-high traffic loads and for denser deployments.
Peer Reviewed
Postprint (published version)