JOURNAL OF TELECOMMUNICATIONS, VOLUME 22, ISSUE 2, NOVEMBER 2013 1

Joint Power Control and Interference Coordination for LTE-Advanced Het-Nets

Irfan Ahmed
Abstract In this research paper, we present the joint resource allocation and power control for LTE-Advanced cellular system. Hetrogeneous networks (HetNets) combined with Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing Access (OFDMA) technology has been widely recognized as a promising candidate for future cellular infrastructure due to the performance enhancement by flexible resource allocation schemes. Most of the existing schemes aim to optimize single cell performance gain. However, the higher frequency reuse factor and smaller cell size requirement lead to severe inter-cell interference problem. Therefore, the multi-cell resource allocation of subchannel, time scheduling and power have been jointly considered to alleviate the severe inter-cell interference problem. Simulation results show the efficacy of proposed scheme as compared to the round robin and proportional fairness schemes. Index TermsLong Term Evalution (LTE), Radio resource allocation, OFDMA, relay

1 INTRODUCTION

!"

he Global System for Mobile communications (GSM) family of technologies including GSM, GPRS, EDGE and UMTS/HSPA played a vital role in accounting for more than 3.6 million subscribers till March 2009 throughout the world. The demand of higher data rates in support of wide range of multimedia applications, internet services has gained a significant attraction around the globe from mobile researchers and industries [1].

vive in this new environment, operators need to decrease or keep operating expenses (OPEX) constant with increased data rate and traffic volumes. To build a business model that decouples network cost from traffic volume, operators are rapidly upgrading their networks to highlyefficient all-IP (Internet protocol) packet switched matrices. Up to a year ago, 4G was still referenced as a set of four competing technologies: LTE, WiMAX, Unlicensed MoAccording to Informa Telecoms & Media in 2008, there bile Access (UMA) and Ultra Mobile Broadband (UMB). were almost 162 million smartphones sold, surpassing In the meantime the smoke has cleared and LTE has notebook sales for the first time, according to Informa emerged as the winning technology. UMA and WiMAX Telecoms & Media. Informa forecasts sales of new will remain as recess technologies. UMB was stopped by smartphones in 2009 will grow more than 30% to Qualcomm in November 2008. With a clear evolution 211.2million units, driven by innovative new devices and path from both OFDMA and CDMA based technologies, operator subsidies designed to promote mobile data con- LTE provides a universal 4G technology that will result in sumption, so that by 2013 almost four in every ten hand- a single, compatible global communication infrastructure sets sold worldwide will be a smartphone. While voice within the foreseeable future. will always be important, mobile data is taking the driv- Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) a group of ers seat as mobile operators develop their near and long- telecommunication associations is working on Long-Term term technology strategies [2]. Evolution Advanced (LTE-Advanced) in order to achieve the requirements of next generation technology. The key The emerging smart phones/similar devices (Smart de- goals for this evolution are increased data rate, improved vices) and the multimedia applications used by these spectrum efficiency, improved coverage and reduced lasmart phones have caused enormous increase in wireless tency. Despite the improvements in peak data rate and mobile data traffic. When the HSPA has been emerged, system capacity provided by MIMO in LTE and LTEwireless mobile broadband traffic exceeded voice traffic Advanced, it was recognized that there was a possibility with more than 50% of traffic used by smart devices. A for further performance improvement by having coordisingle Smart device generates as much traffic as 30 nated transmission and reception between multiple voice/SMS type mobile phones, while a laptop aircard points [3], 3GPP, TR 36.814 Further Advancements for Egenerates as much traffic as 450 such devices. By the end UTRA; Physical Layer Aspects. Layered OFDMA radio of 2013 it is estimated that mobile broadband will con- access is used to attain high system performance and full quer more than 80% of all mobile traffic. In order to sur- backward compatibility. Moreover, key radio access technologies such as fast inter-cell radio resource management, multi-antenna transmissions with more antennas for coverage, and enhanced techniques are employed to I. Ahmed is with the Department of Computer Engineering, College of Computers and Information Technology, Taif University, Taif 21974, Sau- achieve a high level of cell-edge spectrum efficiency. di Arabia. Radio resource allocation can greatly affect the performance and spectrum efficiency of LTE networks. In LTE,

scheduling decisions are made at the base station for both downlink and uplink radio transmissions. Radio resource management includes transmission power management, mobility management, and scheduling of radio resources. An intelligent radio resource management is at the heart of LTE to make it a robust technology to meet the broadband needs of upcoming years. 3GPP standardizing body has determined the required technical specifications of signal, frame, packet and the required user capacity/throughput and leaves the door open for manufacturer and designer to devise scheduling and resource allocation schemes to achieve the best tradeoff between throughput and fairness in uplink and downlink radio transmissions. Throughout the world 4G network systems using LTE are being deployed by many operators to attract more and more subscribers by offering faster access with more efficiency and lower latency than 3G/3.5G. But the anticipated future growth of data traffic especially at high traffic areas is so tremendous that it is necessary to increase the network space using small cells (network densification). These small cells should be enhanced and need to be balanced with existing macrocells so as to optimize performance and provide cost/energy efficient operation. Network densification techniques such as coordinated multipoint (CoMP) transmission/reception and enhanced intercell interference coordination (eICIC) [4] were of great interest in 3GPP after Rel-10. CoMP, eICIC and technical requirements of small cell enhancements along with other techniques are outlined in [5]. Recently, in [6] authors have formulated the resource allocation and scheduling design for multi-cell OFDMA systems with DF relaying as a mixed non-convex and combinatorial optimization problem. They have incorporated a time slot allocation per subcarrier based strategy into the problem formulation for interference mitigation. In the presented scheme, during first time slot, eNB transmits to relays and in second time slot relays transmit to cell edge users. In this paper, authors have only considered the users in outer cell area. In another paper [7], the resource allocation problem is heuristically divided into subchannel allocation at cell lvel and subchannel restriction at central controller level for interference coordination. This paper does not account for the optimal solution and only suboptimal solution has been provided. Another difference from our proposed scheme is that the relays transmit to users in second time slot, while our proposed solution allows both eNB and relay to transmit in second time slot with intra-cell interference coordination. Impact of in-band backhaul on radio resource allocation in a relay-assited OFDMA downlink has been investigated in [8]. Radio resource allocation framework is proposed with the objective to ensure proportional fairness among the UEs. An asymptotically optimal solution is derived by applying the gradient-based scheduling scheme and the Karush- Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions for optimality. Again their work does not cater the intracell interference between eNB and relay's associated UEs.

2 SYESTEM MODEL
We consider a multi-cell relay-assisted LTE-A network as shown in Fig. 1. Each cell has Ns number of sectors and Ml number of relays are placed at 3/4 distance from the eNodeB. Let l !!!"!! = #1, ..., L$, m !!!%l = #0, ..., Ml$, k !! &m = #1, ..., Km$, n !! '! = #1, ..., N $! denote the macrocell, relay/eNodeB (m = 0 means eNodeB) in macrocell l, UE associated with relay/eNodeB m, and resource blocks (RBs), respectively. Since relay receives data in one time slot and transmits in other time slot, the transmission completes in two time slots t = #t1, t2$. The channel state information (CSI) of all wireless links in a cell is assumed to be perfectly known to the eNodeB of the same cell. We assume that the relay selection is done before the resource allocation scheme on the basis of long term CSI, such as in [9]. The fading channels between the network nodes and the UEs are frequency- selective across different RBs while the channels are frequency flat within the same RB. We model the short-term fading due to multipaths be
UE

l,0,k

Relay

eNodeB

Figure 1: System Model

tween network node and UE as Rayleigh fading and backhaul fading channel as Rician fading because relays are owned and managed by operators and are usually placed at a possible line of sight (LOS) location. The channel gains also count both long-term path loss and shadowing. We denote the channel gain of RB n between eNodeB (m = 0) and UE k in mac(n) rocell l as h and between the relay node (m ! 0) and UE k in macrocell l as hl,m,k . We consider in-band type 1 relays which use same carrier frequency in backhaul (U ) and access (U ) interfaces. We assume n u that RBs pairing has been done at each relay according to sorted ordered pair [10] such that (n,n') represents the RB ordered pair for backhaul and access links. The received signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) !l,0,k
(n ) (n )

at UE k associated with macrocell l eNodeB in

!!

( n ,t ) l ,0, k

=
l "#{! $l }

n ,t ) ( n ,t ) ( n ,t ) 2 xl(,0, kP l ,0, k | hl ,0, k |

|h

(n) 2 l ",0, k

| Pl " | al ,k $ bl ",m" | + %% |h
l =1 m =1

Ml

!!

"#$!

( n) 2 l ,m,k

| Pm | al ,k $ al ",k " | + N 0

( n" ,t ) l ,m,k

n" ) ( n" ) 2 Pl (,m , k | hl , m , k |

% |h
l =1

( n" ) 2 l ,0, k

| Pl | al ,k $ bl ",m" | + %

!!

"%$!

l =1 m"#{! l $ m}

|h

( n" ) 2 l , m" , k

| Pm" | al ,k $ al ",k " | + N 0

( n ,t ) l , m ,0

=
l "#{! $l }

,t ) ( n , t ) ( n ,t ) 2 xl(,n m ,0 P l , m ,0 | hl , m ,0 |

|h

(n) 2 l ", m ,0

| Pl " | al ,k $ bl ",m" | +%

"&$!

l =1 m"#{" l $ m}

|h

( n) 2 l ,m,k

| Pm" | al ",k " $ bl ,m | + N 0

RB n is given by (1), where xl ,0,k is the binary decision variable for RB allocation such taht it is equal to one if RB n is allocated to directly connected UE k in macrocell l and P is the transmit power in RB n allocatl ,0, k ed to UE k in direct transmission. Similarly, the received SINR ! l ,m,k at UE associated with relay m in macrocell l is given by (2), and the received SINR at relay m during backhaul transmission from eNodeB in macrocell l is (3).
,t ) ! l(,n m ,0
( n' , t )

( n ,t )

( n ,t )

cient, e.g., if there are few active UEs associated with RS, it will allocate slot 1 with whole frequency resources to underload link eNB-RS, however, our scheme can shrink the frequency domain resource of eNB-RS in in slot 1 and decreases the frequency resource in slot 2 proportionally for RS-UE link.

3 PROPOSED SOLUTION
The interference coordination and power control schemes are described in the following sub-sections:

3.1 Interference Coordination LTE-A type 1 relaying transmissions in the downlink consists of two phases in sequence (i.e., first from eNodeB to RS and then from RS to UE). Considering this characteristic, the subframes allocated to different transmission phases can be coordinated among cells in the time domain. In the first phase the same carrier carries the RBs for directly connected UEs i,e., in first phase/slot, frequency resources are orthogonally divided between RS and directly connected UEs in frequency domain. In the second phase, RS and eNodeB transmit in whole frequency band because their associated UEs are orthogonal in space except small percentage in interference region. The intra-cell interference can be locally managed by serving eNodeB through orthogonal RB allocation to UEs in this region. According to the channel path loss model defined in [11], the strongest interference to the remote users served by an RS mostly comes from their neighboring RSs, and it is advisable to ensure that the resources for RS-UE links of the neighboring cells are kept orthogonal in the time/frequency domain to mitigate the interference. We achieve orthogonality among RS-UE links in all neighboring sectors of macrocells. Our scheme is more dynamic and flexible than [12] which presents timedomain resource allocation with dedicated time slots for eNB-RS, RS-UE, and eNB-UE links which can be ineffi-

3.2 Power Control We consider the power allocation problem with the allocation granularity up to the resource block level. If the channel is known to the transmitter and the receiver, the OFDMA based multiuser access technique with adaptive subchannel and power allocation is superior to other multiuser techniques [13]. Similar to the RRM schemes [14] ,[15], our algorithm first assigns the subchannels to users and then the power allocation algorithm determines the power for each subchannel . Given a set of feasible binary xn ,k 's , each user independently allocates its own power to different subchannels to maximize the utility function. As the utility function is a strictly increasing function of user throughput, maximizing utility is analogous to maximizing throughput. It has been proven that the optimal power allocation for user k is \emph{water-filling} over the subchannels with xn , k = 1 [14]. In our proposed scheme, there is an upper bound on water-filling power allocation determined by the target BER and can be explained by the following BER and transmit power relation for M-QAM in additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel [16] (we choose AWGN for the sake of simplicity, since the BER-SNR trends are the same for AWGN and fading channels, except the gain):

" $1.5! Pk (! ) # BER % 0.2exp & ' !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"'$! M $ 1 P k ( )

where P . It can be seen from the k = P k (! ) p(! )d! above expression that for a fixed BER requirement, if the received SNR increases for a particular UE, then its assigned modulation scheme is upgraded (e.g. from 4QAM to 16QAM). But if an UE is already transmitting with highest modulation scheme (64QAM) then the increase in received SNR results in the reduction of the transmit

"

power in order to maintain the required target BER. The "Water-filling principle" can be obtained by maximizing the individual user information rate under the power constraint:
n"! RB ,k

Pn,k = Pk ,max

#k " K! !!!!!!!!!!!"($!

Following the method of Lagrange multipliers, we get the lagrangian L :

lay transmission and third time slot for relay to relay's associated UEs. Fig. 4 shows that 3D schemes provides higher throughput per UE as compared to the RR-TD-IC and PF-TD-IC schemes with power control. It obvious that though, three time slot scheme eliminates all possible intercell interferences but it suffers from extra time delay occurred in successive time slots. While our 3D scheme uses two time slots for intercell interference minimization by rendering time domain orthogonality from major sources of interference. Fig. 5 shows the cumulative distribution function (CDF) graphs of RR-TD-IC, PF-TD-IC and proposed 3D without power control. It can be seen that the proposed scheme outferms the RR and PF schemes. When power control is applied as shown in Fig. 6, the probability of getting higher throughput has been increased. The sum throughput as a function of increasing number of UEs with and without power control is shown in Fig. 7. This figure shows that the sum throughput increases with the increasing number of UEs, but this increase is not linear because of limited number of radio resources.
3GPP Case 1 (macrocell radius 500m, 25UEs/macrocell) 30 UE Relay eNodeB

L=

# $ log 2 (1 + "n ,k ) + !k & Pk ,max % * Pn ,k ' ")$! * & ' n"! RB ,k n"! RB ,k ( )

The unknown transmit powers P n , k are determined by setting the partial derivatives of $L$ to zero, which results in the following,
"1 Pn,k = # &!0 " !n,k $ ' , i % " RB,k !!!!!!!!!!"*$! +

where !0 is a constant, given by 1/ !k ln2 ., with !k being the lagrange multiplier associated with user k . !0 can be determined from the power constraint and !i , k is the channel gain to noise ratio, defined as

!n ,k =

| H n ,k |
2 #! n

25

, i " " RB ,k !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"+$!

distance scale 1:50

20

15

10

4 SIMULATION RESULTS
We consider LTE-A cellular network with 7 macrocells with three sectors per macrocell. Simulations are performed according to the latest 3GPP LTE-Advanced specifications [17]. Results are provided for both urban (Case 1) scenario with inter-site-distances (ISDs) of 500 m. For this case, carrier frequency of 2GHz has been specified. We use frequency division duplex (FDD) multiplexing for uplink and downlink transmission orthogonality with 10MHz for each link. The eNB-only deployment is considered as a reference to determine the performance gains of interference coordination when relay cell expansion is applied. One relay is placed at 2/3 radius distance from the donor eNodeB in each sector. Simulation scenario is shown in Fig. 2 As a baseline, we have evaluated the UEs throughput and throughput distribution in a macrocell with relays but without power control in Fig. 3 and. Two scheduling schemes, round robin (RR) and proportional fairness (PF) have been used to allocate the radio resources to UEs. It can be seen in Fig. 3 that channel-aware PF outperforms the flat RR resource allocation scheme. We have compared our proposed 3D resource allocation scheme with RR time domain interference coordination (RR-TD-IC) and PF time domain interference coordination (PF-TD-IC) schemes. TD-IC has been presented in [12] which utilizes three time slots. First time slot for eNB to directly connected UEs transmission, second time slot for eNB to re-

-5

-10 -10

-5

5 10 distance scale 1:50

15

20

25

Figure 2: Simulation scenario

Figure 3: Individual user throughput without power control

Macrocell with relays and power control 3 RR-TD-IC PF-TD-IC Proposed 3D 3D mean
Macrocell sum throughput in Mbps
Macrocell Area Throughput 50 45 40 35 30 25 20 15 10 5 RR-TD-IC PF-TD-IC Proposed 3D 3D w/ power control PF-TD-ID w/ power control RR-TD-IC w/ power control

2.5

Users throughput in Mbps

1.5

0.5

10

10

15 Number of users

20

25

30

15 Number of users

20

25

Figure 4: Individual user throughput with power control

Figure 7: Macrocell throughput Vs number of users

Macrocell with relays 1 0.9 0.8 0.7 0.6

CDF

5
RR-TD-IC PF-TD-IC Proposed 3D

CONCLUSION

0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1 0

0.5

1.5 2 2.5 UE throughput in Mbps

3.5

In this paper we have presented a joint radio resource allocation and power control scheme to mitigate the interfenece in LTE-A Het-Nets. The proposed frequency-time domain resource allocation scheme when combined with water-filling power control provides a substantial gain in terms of individual throughput as well as sytem throughput. Simulation results have been provided to show the quantitative analysis between few existing schemes as compared to the proposed scheme.

Figure 5: User throughput distribution without power control

Macrocell with relays and power control 1 0.9 0.8 0.7 0.6 RR-TD-IC PF-TD-IC Proposed 3D

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work was supported in part by a grant from King Abdulaziz City of Science and Technology (KACST) grant No. P-C-11-555.

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Figure 6: User throughput distribution power control

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University, Islamabad, Pakistan, during 2008 to 2010. His research interests include wireless LAN (WLAN) medium access control (MAC) protocol design and analysis, cooperative communications, MIMO communications, performance analysis of wireless channels, energy constrained wireless networks, cognitive radio networks, and radio resource allocation. He is an author of more than 25 International publications.

Irfan Ahmed received the B.E. Electrical Engineering degree from University of Engineering and Technology, Taxila, Pakistan, in 1999, the M.S. Computer Engineering degree from CASE, Islamabad, Pakistan, in 2003, and the PhD degree in Telecommunication Engineering from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China, in 2008. Currently, he is working as assistant professor in Taif University, KSA. He was post-doctoral fellow with Qatar University from April 2010 to March 2011, where he worked on two research projects, wireless mesh networks with Purdue University, USA, and radio resource allocation for LTE with Qtel. He has also been involved in National ICT Pakistan funded research project design and development of MIMO and Cooperative MIMO test-bed at Iqra