Interference Self-Coordination: A Proposal to Enhance Reliability of System-Level Information in OFDM-Based Mobile Networks via PCI Planning

For system-level information in OFDM-based mobile networks, the full-cell coverage requirement raises the issue of Inter-Cell Interference (ICI) in physical control channels. Unfortunately, conventional approaches (e.g., scheduling, beamforming) cannot effectively deal with this kind of ICI because of configuration limitations in physical control channels. To solve this challenge, this study defines a new concept of `Interference Self-Coordination (ISC)' for enhancing this system-level information delivery. Specifically, we apply ISC to relieve the ICI effect over the Physical Downlink Control Channel (PDCCH), the most important physical control channel in Long-Term Evolution (LTE/LTE-Advanced) networks, in which Physical Cell Identifier (PCI) planning naturally serves as a self-coordination mechanism. We prove that PCI planning is the most effective solution to relieve ICI over PDCCHs, under the constraint of non-orthogonal control regions between neighboring cells. Since PCI planning is an NP-Complete problem, heuristic-strategy algorithms are devised for implementation, which are self-adaptive to dynamic configurations of the network and system, and compatible with any applicable ICI solutions. The numerical analysis and system-level simulation experiment results demonstrate that this proposal can increase overall system throughput by up to 17%, and also improve cell-edge throughput by up to 42%. In the worst 5% of sectors, the proposal can still obtain 45% system throughput and 200% cell-edge throughput gain.