Self‐organizing interference management for LTE

In orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) systems such as Long Term Evolution (LTE), it is extremely important to reduce interference between neighboring cells, especially for cell edge users, since the only interference in LTE is inter‐cell interference due to the orthogonality of the sub‐carriers used in the transmissions. This paper describes a few self‐organizing and self‐optimizing techniques to manage and reduce this inter‐cell interference. These self‐optimizing network (SON)‐based techniques are inter‐cell interference coordination (ICIC) and uplink (UL) interference over thermal (IoT) control. Simulation results are presented showing the improvements that can be obtained with the use of such techniques in interference limited operating scenarios. © 2010 Alcatel‐Lucent. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.