Downlink interference control through adaptive DRX in a carrier aggregation enabled LTE-Advanced heterogeneous networks

An LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) Heterogeneous Network (HetNet) constitutes of a macro cell and small cells, where, the former acts as an overlay network and the latter as an underlay network. In HetNet, enabling Carrier Aggregation (CA) usually results in severe downlink interference at small cells from macro cell because of high powered transmissions from macro cell on over-lapping component carriers (co-channels). The intensity of downlink interference is much more profound in HetNet enabled with CA than compared with a single carrier HetNet and ultimately affects the Quality of Service (QoS) of users connected to small cells. Some frequency domain solutions like cross carrier scheduling, soft frequency reuse, and downlink power control have been proposed so far, but they do not provide complete orthogonal transmissions among macro and small cells, leading to adjacent channel interference. Also, a few time domain approaches like Almost Blank Subframe (ABS), dynamic ABS have been proposed in the literature. However, the resource utilization of cells decreases due to high number of ABS assignments in the dense deployment, which also results in low user throughput. In this paper, we propose a combined time domain and frequency domain novel idea for downlink interference control, which is via adaptive Discontinuous Reception (DRX) settings through Multi-Objective optimizations and an optimal carrier allocation scheme, respectively. The proposed idea mitigates the downlink co-channel interference by enabling intermittent data reception at the User Equipment (UE) through adaptive DRX settings, also it utilizes an effective carrier allocation scheme such that users are always allocated to carriers with least interference. The analytical model and simulation results reveal that the proposed idea achieves average gain of 3.5 times w.r.t cell throughput when compared with well-known downlink interference mitigation schemes.