2013 IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC): PHY

Downlink Interference Cancellation in LTE:

Potential and Challenges
Eric Hardouin, Mohamad Sayed Hassan and Ahmed Saadani
Orange Labs
38-40 rue du General Leclerc, 92794 Issy Moulineaux cedex 9, France
Email: {eric.hardouin, ahmed.saadani}@orange.com, mohamad.sayed@ieee.org

AbstractThis paper introduces the potential of downlink

interference cancellation (IC) receivers in LTE user equipments,
where the interfering signal is channel decoded by the victim
receiver. After an introduction to possible IC schemes, we discuss
the challenges related to making IC feasible, and the related
changes required in the LTE standard. Preliminary system-level
simulation results for both full buffer and non full buffer traffic
models show that IC has a great potential for capacity and
user experience gains. These results are based on an idealistic
modelling of IC, therefore providing an upper bound of the gains
achievable in practice.

I. I NTRODUCTION
The Long Term Evolution (LTE) mobile communications
system is being deployed around the Globe, providing significantly enhanced network capacity, user data rates and
latency compared to 3G systems. In the meantime the 3rd
Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) continues to make the
LTE technology evolve in order to cope with the sustained
mobile data traffic increase expected in the coming years.
Interference mitigation is key to further improve the network
capacity and the user data rates, especially at the cell edge.
To this end, interference mitigation techniques have formed
an integral part of the LTE design since the first version of
the LTE specifications, which correspond to the Release 8
of 3GPP. In this first LTE Release, Inter-Cell Interference
Coordination (ICIC) mechanisms allowed neighboring base
stations (called eNodeB in 3GPP) to coordinate semi-static
restrictions on the frequency domain power allocation to create
resources with reduced inter-cell interference levels [1]. In
Release 10, these mechanisms were improved to include a time
dimension to the resource allocation coordination, targetting
heterogeneous networks where low-power nodes (e.g. pico
eNodeBs) are deployed under the macro cell coverage to
densify the network. This technique, called eICIC, relies on
the transmission by the aggressor cell of an Almost Blank
Subframe (ABS), where the control and data channels are
not transmitted (or with a significantly reduced power). The
vicitim cell can then take advantage of the reduced interference
to schedule in ABSs its users mostly affected by the aggressor
interference [1]. Nevertheless, the ABSs still contain common reference signals, synchronisation signals and common
channels, which still can affect cell-edge users in the victim
cell. This is particularly the case if the network wishes to
maximise the offload of the macro cell towards the low-power
nodes, by biasing the User Equipments (UEs) measurement

978-1-4673-5939-9/13/$31.00 2013 IEEE

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so that they attach to the low-power node even if the macro

cell is received with a higher power. As a further step, Release
11 introduces the Coordinated Multipoint transmission and/or
reception (CoMP), also known in the litterature as Network
MIMO, where transmission/reception points can dynamically
coordinate the resource allocation as well as the MIMO
precoding decisions. The mechanisms allowed in the CoMP
framework include joint transmission/reception, where the
user data is jointly transmitted/received from several points,
coordinated scheduling (and possibly beamforming), and dynamic point selection (and/or blanking) [2]. The associated
standard updates mainly address refinements of the channel
measurements and feedback framework, in order to allow the
UEs to report to their serving cell the channel conditions
experienced from neighboring cells.
In addition to these transmitter-based solutions, receiverbased solutions for the downlink have started to be specified
in Release 11, by means of performance requirements: Interference Rejection Combining (IRC) effectively performs a
Linear Minimum Mean Square Error (LMMSE) filtering of the
received signal to reduce the contribution of the interference
in the spatial domain, and can be applied to data and control
channels. Besides, interference cancellation of the common
reference signals (CRS) has been introduced in order to cope
with the remaining interference in the ABS subframes, in order
to further extend the low power nodes range. In the latter,
the interfering signal is reconstructed based on the channel
estimate from the interfering cell and the prior knowledge of
the transmitted sequence, and is subsequently subtracted from
the received signal.
Given the essential role of the receiver in the overall system
performance as well as the increase in the UEs computational
and memory capabilities over time, it is expected that the next
step in 3GPP towards receiver enhancements is data interference cancellation (IC). Indeed, perfect interference mitigation
performed at the transmitter side (e.g. with CoMP) requires
accurate channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter,
which is difficult to achieve because of the significant feedback
overhead it requires, and its sensitivity to measurements errors
and feedback delay. As a result, even in a CoMP system some
residual interference can be expected. In contrast, receiver side
processing does not require an accurate CSI at the transmitter,
at the expense of an increased computational complexity.
As we will see in this paper, IC requires in addition some

network assistance in order to be widely applicable. Note that

a scheme relying on a cooperation between the network and
an interference rejection receiver was proposed earlier in [3];
however the latter considered a linear IRC processing, whose
requirements are much lighter than IC.
This paper presents the potential of IC for LTE, as well
as the related challenges. Section II reviews potential receiver
strategies and their requirements. Section III then discusses
the additional features needed in LTE to enable IC. Section
IV exposes an initial assessment of the performance benefits of
IC for the network capacity and user experience, and Section
V finally presents our conclusions.

Fig. 1.

Outline of the IC principle (Hard SIC).

II. BASICS OF INTERFERENCE CANCELLATION

Fig. 1 outlines the principle of an IC receiver, in a scenario
where a UE (denoted UE1) is interfered by the downlink
transmissions toward two other UEs (denoted UE2 and UE3)
on the same carrier frequency. The receiver estimates the signal
contribution of each interferer by
1) demodulating the interferers data;
2) reconstructing the associated interference by remodulating the detected data and multiplying it by the estimated
channel response.
The estimated interfering signal is then subtracted from the
received signal prior to detecting the next interferer, and finally
the signal of interest.
Several receiver architectures are possible in practice to
achieve the interference demodulation operation (step 1
above). Unlike CDMA systems, where IC has been widely
studied [4], typical OFDM systems like LTE do not use
spreading. As a result, the only processing gain available to
extract the signal of a particular UE from the received signal
in a wide range of conditions is supplied by the channel
decoding. Note that in some cases, e.g. when a single interferer
is received with a very high power, channel decoding might not
be necessary. Nevertheless, in the general case it is expected
that a receiver only capable of symbol-level detection of the
interference will provide a limited gain. Therefore, we focus
in the following on receivers able to decode the interfering
signal. Two main strategies are then possible.
The Hard Successive Interference Canceller (SIC) attempts
to detect and decode one by one the interferers of interest, as
depicted on Fig. 1. In LTE, the Hard SIC can take advantage
of the Cyclic Redundancy Check attached to each transport
block issued by the Medium Access Control (MAC) layer
before channel coding: if after channel decoding the CRC
check is successful, the block has been correctly decoded and
the interfering signal can be perfectly reconstructed (minor the
channel estimation errors). After the received signal has been
cleaned up from one interferer (generally the one with the
highest received power), a second interferer can be processed,
and so on. The Hard SIC however imposes the constraint that
the Modulation and Coding Scheme (MCS) used by the first
interferer be more robust than the MCS used for the signal of
interest, as it will need to be decoded under the interference
of the latter (UE1 in the example of Fig. 1).

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Fig. 2.

Example of MU-MIMO and inter-cell interference.

Another alternative which does not suffer from this constraint is the Turbo SIC (see e.g. [5]), where the desired and
interfering signals are processed as outlined below (assuming
a single interferer for the sake of clarity):
1) soft estimation of UE1s information bits using a soft-in
soft-out channel decoder;
2) construction of soft estimates of UE1s symbols and
multiplication by the estimated channel response to
obtain a soft estimate of UE1s signal contribution.
3) subtraction of UE1s soft signal estimation from the
originally received signal;
4) do steps 1-2 for UE2 (interferer) instead of UE1, from
the signal obtained in step 3;
5) subtraction of UE2s soft signal estimation from the
originally received signal;
6) soft estimation of UE1s data, from the signal obtained
in step 5;
7) repeat steps 2-6 until successful decoding of UE1s data
(e.g. checked by means of CRC), or after a given number
of iterations.
As the estimate of the interference each transmitter creates for
a given UE is refined iteratively, the constraint on the MCS
of the interferers to enable a succesful interference decoding
is alleviated.
Note that IC can be employed for both inter-cell and intracell interference. In LTE, intra-cell interference originates from
the Multi-User (MU) Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO)
transmission [6], where two (or more, up to four) UEs can
be multiplexed on the same time frequency resources, being
separated in the spatial domain. This separation relies on the
MIMO precoding at the transmitter, which is sensitive to the
CSI accuracy and thus generally imperfect. Fig. 2 materializes
an example scenario where UE2 is an intra-cell interferer,
whereas UE3 is an inter-cell interferer.
III. C HALLENGES AND FEASIBILITY IN LTE
In contrast to LMMSE processing, which only needs an estimation of the covariance matrix of the interference (or received

signal) [7], interference cancellation requires estimating the

channel of the interferer, and decoding its signal. This poses
several challenges for the system design, which are discussed
in this section.
A. Receiver complexity
MMSE-SIC was assumed for the Release 8 MIMO design
and is expected to become available in products at some point
in time, thanks to the increasing processing complexity of
mobile terminals. The baseband complexity of MMSE-SIC is
the same whether the MIMO layers belong to the same or
different UEs, so that a UE capable of applying the MMSESIC to cancel one SU-MIMO layer could as well apply it
to cancel one layer belonging to another UE. An additional
burden comes from the need to estimate the channel from
possibly several cells on the same resources, nevertheless this
extra complexity is not seen as dramatic when compared to
the whole receiver complexity. In general, reaching a certain
(reasonable) baseband processing level is only a matter of time
thanks to Moores law.
The complexity of IC receivers depends also obviously on
the number of processed interferers. Measures performed in
a live UMTS network showed that UEs at the cell edge are
often able to detect only two interfering cells, at most three
in general [8]. Therefore, limiting the number of processed
interferers to two seems reasonable. We will see in section
IV that processing a single interferer can already provide
substantial performance gains.
B. Interferers channel estimation
The channel of each processed interferer has to be reliably estimated, first in order to decode its data and then
to reconstruct the associated received signal with a good
quality. This requires the reference signal (RS) used by the
interferer to be known at the victim, and the SINR experienced
on the RS to allow a sufficient channel estimation quality.
Two RS frameworks exist in the downlink of LTE. The first
one is based on Cell-specific RS (CRS), which consist in
a cell-specific RS sequence transmitted on every subframe,
on resources determined by the cell ID. These resources are
spread over the whole bandwidth and the subframe duration,
with a fairly high density. CRS can be used for channel
estimation for both Channel State Information (CSI) estimation and feedback, and demodulation. The second framework,
introduced in Release 10, decouples the RS into CSI-RS, for
CSI estimation and feedback, and Demodulation RS (DMRS)
for demodulation. CSI-RS are transmitted with a low density
and a configurable periodicity over the whole bandwidth, while
DMRS are transmitted with a high density (similar to CRS)
but only in the resources allocated to a given UE. This new
framework allows 8 transmit antennas to be supported, and
offers better MIMO precoding and interference coordination
capabilities, as we will see below.
Other cells channel estimation for CSI reporting has been
granted since Release 10, in order to anticipate the definition
of CoMP (specified in Release 11). It relies on the possibility

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for a cell (noted cell A) to transmit with zero power on the

resources used by a neighboring cell (cell B) to transmit its
CSI-RS. This effectively suppresses cell As interference on
cell Bs CSI-RS.
In addition, the possibility to allocate orthogonal DMRS
sequence to UEs in neighboring cells is introduced in Release
11, orthogonal DMRS sequences being available for UEs
in the same cell (for MU-MIMO) since Release 10. This
framework however limits the number of orthogonal sequences
to two, which constrains the victim and aggressor UEs to be
served with a single MIMO layer if no DMRS interference
is seeked. Note that the lack of RS orthogonality may be
compensated by more powerful signal processing, e.g. by
refining the channel estimation at each iteration of the TurboSIC process. However, there is no mechanism up to Release
11 to inform a UE about the DMRS sequence used by
another interfering UE. Such a mechanism would need to be
introduced to enable IC in LTE.
For CRS, no mechanism facilitating the RS interference
handling is available, nevertheless their high density combined
with efficient signal processing may allow acceptable channel
estimation quality for both CSI feedback and demodulation.
Further study is needed to clarify this point. CRS being cellspecific, the victim UE can deduce the interfers RS sequence
from the knowledge of its serving cell.
C. Interferers MCS decodability
In order to decode the interferers data, its modulation and
coding scheme (MCS) has to be decodable by the victim.
Indeed, if a UE at the cell edge (thus experimenting generally
a poor channel quality) is interfered by a signal intended to a
UE in the cell center encoded with a high MCS (e.g. 64QAM,
and 8/9 code rate) then the victim will most likely not be able
to decode the interfering data. A coordinated link adaptation
across neighboring cells (or within the cell for MU-MIMO)
taking into account both the UE of interest but also a potential
IC-enabled interfered UE is therefore needed to guarantee
that IC is feasible. Without such a coordination, IC would be
sometimes feasible and sometimes not, making difficult for
the base station to select the appropriate MCS for its served
UE.
D. Resource alignment between victim and interfers
If channel decoding of the interferer is used, the resources
allocated to both the victim UE and the interfer(s) should be
aligned as much as possible in order to reduce the processing
complexity. Indeed, the channel decoding operation requires
demodulating the full resource allocation of the targetted
interferer. For instance, if one interferers signal occupies
the full system bandwidth whereas the victims signal is
transmitted only over one third of the bandwidth, then the
complexity associated with decoding the interfers data is
much higher than for the data of interest, which may reduce the
interest for employing IC in this case. Ideally, the victim and
interferer(s) would occupy the same resources. Nevertheless,
having a non-identical but close resource allocation is expected

to capture a large part of the IC benefits. The consequence

would be that interference may not be cancelled on all the
resources (if the interferers allocation is smaller than for the
victim) or that a small extra complexity would be needed (if
the interferers allocation slightly exceeds the victims one).
However, it would yield the great benefit of providing more
opportunities to the schedulers to find pairs of victim/aggressor
UEs able to take advantage of IC. The resource alignment
has to be taken care of by coordinated scheduling between
neighboring cells, in the same way as for CoMP.
In order to minimize the inter-cell IC complexity, it is
required to time-synchronize the network, so that the victim
and interfering signals can be demodulated via a single FFT.
Note that time-synchronization is also a pre-requisite for
CoMP and eICIC.
E. Informing the UE about the interferers parameters
In order for the UE to demodulate and decode an interferers
signal, it has to know the associated transmission parameters.
In LTE, the latters are the DMRS sequence, the MCS, the
allocated resources and the identity of the UE (called Radio
Network Temporary Identifier in LTE). Up to Release 11, a
UE cannot access any of these pieces of information related
to another UE. Some mechanisms (e.g. a new signalling) then
need to be introduced into the standard in order to provide
this information to the victim UE.
F. Summary
This section has described a number of challenges to be
solved in order to allow IC at the UE in LTE. Most of these
challenges can be solved by reusing the framework established
for CoMP, in particular through scheduling coordination. From
this respect, the transmitter-receiver cooperation needed for IC
can be seen as an extension of CoMP. From standard perspective, the only aspect that requires additional specification is
the means to inform the victim UE about the transmission
parameters of the interferers.
IV. I NITIAL PERFORMANCE EVALUATION
A. Simulator description
The performance assessments are conducted with a systemlevel simulator handling the fast fading channel with a Time
Transmission Interval (TTI) granularity, equal to 1 ms in LTE.
This allows accurate simulation of Medium Access Control
and Physical layer mechanisms, such as advanced signal
processing at the transmitter and receiver, link adaptation,
scheduling, etc. The investigated environment reproduces an
urban macro network deployment made up from a hexagonal
network of 19 tri-sectored sites (57 cells). The long-term
attenuation between any eNodeB and UE pair includes the
path loss, the shadowing and the antenna gain. The inter-cell
interference modelling involves the 56 interfering cells, the
MIMO channels of the 56 interferers being accurately modeled
including the fast fading. All the eNodeBs are assumed to
transmit at full power.

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The feedback framework reproduces the LTE one. Each UE

measures its Channel Quality Indicator (CQI), Precoding Matrix Indicator (PMI), Rank Quality Indicator (RI) and and feeds
them back to its serving eNodeB every 5 ms. The scheduler
uses a time-frequency selective proportional fair algorithm to
determine the UEs resource allocation. 2x2 SU-MIMO with
adaptive rank selection is employed, the precoding matrix
being selected from the LTE codebook following the UE recommendation. Link adaptation is performed from the reported
CQI, which assumes the IC capability. Ten MCSs are used,
with BPSK, QPSK, 16QAM and 64QAM modulations and
turbo codes with rates 1/2, 2/3 and 3/4. HARQ with Chase
Combining and explicit feedback of ACK/NACK messages
are fully modelled. Perfect estimation of the channels and
perfect transmission of the feedback messages and HARQ
acknowledgements are assumed.
The physical layer abstraction is based on the MIESM
method [9] which compresses the measured SINRs on the
different subcarriers into an effective SINR reflecting the
global quality of link over the allocated subcarriers. This
effective SINR is then mapped on the link-level look-up table
corresponding to the used MCS to determine the associated
BLER, and then whether the transmitted block has been
correctly received or not.
The simulator collects the results over the whole network
and derives statistics on the performance in term of users
throughput and cell capacity. This is done over several snapshots of randomly drawn UEs positions.
B. Simulation assumptions
Two different traffic models are considered. In the full buffer
traffic model, all UEs have permanently packets to receive.
We also consider a realistic FTP traffic model, where UEs are
generated in the network according to a predefined arrival rate;
they remain in the network up to the complete reception of a
2 Mbytes packet, and then they are dropped.
The baseline receiver is an MMSE-SIC modelling realistically the SU-MIMO interference cancellation. We add to this
receiver the capability of performing inter-cell IC for the N
dominant interferers in the long term, i.e. based on their path
loss and shadowing only, with N = 1 or N = 2. The intercell IC is modelled in an idealistic manner by affecting the
interference term associated to each targetted interferer by
a factor 0.2 in the per-subcarrier post-receiver (MMSE-SIC
for SU-MIMO interference) SINR formula. This modelling is
equivalent to assuming the following:
inter-cell interference cancellation at the receiver is imperfect: 20% residual interfering power remains after the
cancellation step;
perfect scheduling coordination is performed, so that IC
of the targetted interferer(s) is always feasible;
the necessary resource allocation and link adaptation
coordinations do not impose any scheduling constraint
(which would reduce the performance).
The above assumptions, especially the last one, are obviously
idealistic. For this reason, the presented results should be seen

TABLE I
S IMULATION PARAMETERS

Channel model
Penetration loss
UEs distribution
Traffic models
Antennas
MIMO scheme
Feedback
UE receiver

Interference modelling
Channel estimation
Scheduling
HARQ

Value
FDD downlink, 2 GHz
10 MHz
19 tri-sector macro sites with wrap-around,
500 m inter-site distance
ITU Uma, 3 km/h
20 dB for indoor UEs,
0 dB for outdoor UEs
Uniform 75 % UEs indoors,
10 UEs/cell for full buffer
Full buffer
FTP model 1 in [10] with 2 Mbytes packets
2 Tx X-pol, 2 Rx X-pol
SU-MIMO with adaptive number of layers
PUSCH 3-1 with 5 ms duty cycle
MMSE-SIC with IRC for
SU-MIMO w/wo inter-cell
interference cancellation up to 2 interferers
Fully modelled from 56 cells
Ideal
Proportional Fair, frequency selective
Explicit with 4 transmissions maximum

90
80
70

CDF

Parameter
Carrier
Bandwidth
Network layout

100

IC, N = 2

60

IC, N = 1

50

Baseline, no IC

40
30
20
10
0
0

10

User throughput (Mbps)

Fig. 3.

Full buffer traffic, Inter- & intra-eNodeB IC.

100
90

C. Results
Using the system simulator described in the previous sections, we evaluate the performance gains brought by inter-cell
IC for a macro LTE network, first for the inter- & intraeNodeB case. This case typically represents a deployment
scenario where neighboring eNodeBs are inter-connected via
a low-latency (typically less than 1 ms) backhaul, in order
to enable a dynamic scheduling coordination between the
aggressor(s) and the victim cell.
For the full buffer traffic model, the considered performance
metrics are the system capacity, defined by the cell throughput,
and the cell-edge user throughput, defined as the 5th percentile
of the user throughput cumulative distribution function (CDF).
Fig. 3 shows the user throughput CDFs for the inter-eNodeB
IC, and Table II summarizes the associated capacity and
cell-edge user throughputs, for N = 1 and N = 2 processed
interferers.
As can be seen, the performance gains in the inter- & intraeNodeB case are huge, with roughly 30% and 65% increases in
both cell capacity and cell-edge user throughput, for N = 1 and
N = 2, respectively. Again, we need to keep in mind that these
results represent an upper bound of the achievable results, as
in practice the scheduling constraints imposed by the need
to ensure the aggressor MCSs decoding at the victim on the

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80
70

CDF

as an upper bound of the gains achievable in practice.

Two different inter-cell IC scenarios are studied:
Inter- & intra-eNodeB: The UE is able to process the
N = 1 or N = 2 dominant interferers from any cell in the
network;
Intra-eNodeB: The UE is able to process the dominant
interferers only from the cells controlled by its serving
site.
The other simulation parameters are summarized in table I.

60

IC, N = 2

50

IC, N = 1

40

Baseline, no IC

30
20
10
0
0

10

User throughput (Mbps)

Fig. 4.

Full buffer traffic, Intra-eNodeB IC.

one hand, and the resource allocation alignment between the

aggressors and the victim on the other hand, will most likely
reduce the gains. Still, given the high observed gains, it is
expected that when more realistic constraints will be applied,
the gain will remain significant. Further studies are needed to
confirm this point.
The inter-eNodeB case ideally requires a low-latency backhaul. When such a high performance backhaul is not available, semi-static scheduling and/or MCS restrictions may be
applied, at the expense of a performance gain degradation.
Alternatively, the scheduling coordination can be restrained to
the cells controlled by the same site. The latter always allows
dynamic scheduling coordination regardless of the backhaul
type, as the cells from the same site can be controlled by a
central scheduler.
The performance of this intra-eNodeB case is shown in Fig.
4 and Table III, for N = 1 and N = 2 processed interferers. In

TABLE II
F ULL BUFFER TRAFFIC , I NTER - & I NTRA - E N ODE B IC
No IC/IC
No IC
IC, N=1
IC, N=2

Capacity (Mbps)
15.5 (0 %)
20.3(+31 %)
26.4 (+70 %)

TABLE IV
FTP TRAFFIC , I NTER - & I NTRA - E N ODE B IC

Cell-edge user throughput (Mbps)

0.38 (0 %)
0.49 (+30 %)
0.63 (+66 %)

No IC/IC
No IC
IC, N=1
IC, N=2

TABLE III
F ULL BUFFER TRAFFIC , I NTRA - E N ODE B IC
No IC/IC
No IC
IC, N=1
IC, N=2

Capacity (Mbps)
15.5 (0 %)
19.2 (+24 %)
23.2 (+50 %)

Capacity (Mbps)
9.04 (0 %)
11.3 (+25 %)
14.1 (+56 %)

TABLE V
FTP TRAFFIC , I NTRA - E N ODE B IC

Cell-edge user throughput (Mbps)

0.38 (0 %)
0.45 (+19 %)
0.47 (+22 %)

No IC/IC
No IC
IC, N=1
IC, N=2

this case, the processed interferers are necessarily other cells

from the same site. Compared to the inter- & intra eNodeB
IC, the intra-eNodeB IC leads naturally to a gain reduction.
Nevertheless, for N = 1 most of the inter- & intra eNodeB IC
gain is retained. This shows adjacent sectors of the same site
represent a large share of the dominant inter-cell interferers.
For N = 2, the intra-eNodeB IC still achieves the main part
the inter- & intra eNodeB IC capacity gain, but the cell-edge
user throughput gain is severely decreased (from +66% to
+22%). This is explained by the fact that the UEs located
at the border between two sectors of the same site are little
impacted by the remaining sector. Going from N = 1 to N = 2
in the intra-eNodeB case therefore does not bring much gain
for these users; in contrast, cancelling a cell controlled by
another site would bring added benefits. This is apparent from
the comparison of the cell-edge user throughputs for N = 1 and
N = 2 in the intra-eNodeB case, where cancelling the second
interferer brings only 3% additional gain. The large capacity
gain brought by N = 2 compared to N = 1 in this case, when
related to the previously discussed result, suggests that the
UEs already in good radio conditions are mostly benefiting
from the second interferer cancellation capability.
Table IV and Table V summarize the capacity gains observed for the FTP traffic model, in the inter- & intraeNodeB case and the intra-eNodeB case, respectively. Here,
the capacity is defined as the maximum cell throughput that
allows the cell-edge user throughput to reach a target value
of 2 Mbps. Indeed, seeking to guarantee a certain minimum
user throughput is expected to be a way to deploy dataoriented networks in the future. We observe again significant
gains with respect to a baseline system without IC, the
capacity increasing by 25%/15% for one cancelled dominant
interferer to 56%/30% for two cancelled dominant interferers,
in the inter- & intra-eNodeB/intra-eNodeB cases, respectively.
Although reduced compared to the full buffer traffic, these
results follow the same tendencies and confirm that IC has a
high potential for gain in LTE.
V. C ONCLUSIONS
This paper has introduced the potential of interference
cancellation (IC) receivers in LTE. After an introduction to

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Capacity (Mbps)
9.04 (0 %)
10.4 (+15 %)
11.8 (+31 %)

possible IC schemes, we have discussed the challenges related

to making IC feasible, and the potential changes required in
the LTE standard to achieve this goal. Preliminary systemlevel simulation results both for full buffer and non full buffer
traffics have shown IC has a great potential for capacity and
user experience gains. These results were based on an idealistic
modelling of IC, therefore providing an upper bound of the
gains achievable in practice. A more realistic modelling of
the IC process in system level simulations is needed in order
to obtain results more representative of the practical gains.
Furthermore, some research work is needed in order to devise
appropriate scheduling and link adaptation strategies to ensure
the feasibility of IC in a wide range of practical conditions,
thereby maximizing the gains of this technique.
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