User demand for capacity and high data rate applications imposes the need for new technologies able to cope with these challenges. Fourth Generation cellular networks have set the initiative for a technology evolution that will surpass the constraints and provide better quality of service and improved performance. In this context, Heterogeneous Networks (HetNets) deployments, combining a variety of different cell sizes, are considered in the literature in order to enhance the coverage and capacity of cellular systems. However, they require enhanced techniques especially for the user-to-cell association, resource allocation and interference management processes. On that respect, in this work we present a novel scheme that exploits jointly the frequency, power and time dimensions for interference mitigation in order to balance the trade-off between interference reduction to small cell users and throughput degradation for macrocell users. Simulation results have shown that the proposed solution utilizes more efficiently the available resources compared to a conventional scheme and boosts the capacity up to 45%.

Peer Reviewed