A New Link Adaptation Method to Mitigate SINR Mismatch in Ultra-Dense Small Cell LTE Networks

In this paper, we consider a new interference problem caused by idle small cells, which have no associated user equipment in ultra-dense small cell long-term evolution (LTE) networks. Specifically, we investigate the effect of idle small cells on the signal to interference and noise ratio (SINR) of the cell-specific reference signal (CRS) and the data signals. We confirm that CRS interference from idle small cells produces uneven interference pattern across CRS and data signals and eventually causes an SINR mismatch between CRS and data signals as well as between data signals with and without CRS symbols. In addition, these phenomena become severe with cell densification. In order to solve this mismatch problem, we propose a simple link adaptation framework, which utilizes clustered CRS assignment and hybrid SINR measurement. The numerical results show that the proposed method improves the average sum throughput compared with the conventional approaches. Overall, this paper sheds new light on investigating and coping with the interference problem coming from idle small cells in future ultra-dense small cell LTE networks.