LTE multi-cellular system in urban environment: inter-cell interference Impact on the Downlink radio transmission

The fourth-generation networks based on OFDMA (3GPP LTE) (3rd Generation Partnership Project Long Term Evolution) offer high bit rate and takes into account in their mechanisms the simplicity and efficiency of the radio transmission. But with the volume of traffic constantly increasing, especially in high density population environments, the reuse of bandwidth is the only effective way to increase the capacity in LTE system. The conventional approach to improve the spectrum efficiency is to reuse the same frequency band in multiple geographic areas or cells. However, inter-cell interference (ICI) will inevitably disadvantageous, when the mobile stations or users in adjacent cells share the same spectrum. High mobility makes the situation worse. The SINR at the Cell-edge may be so poor that even the most robust control channel PDCCH cannot function properly. This is one of the major problems limiting the performance of LTE (Long Term Evolution). This work studies the impact of inter-cell interference on the downlink LTE radio systems in multi-cellular urban environment that meets the specifications of the 3GPP, and deals with the challenge to optimize the SINR in real networks that can be far from the idealistic model of the 3GPP.