User-cooperative interference mitigation schemes for next-generation mobile communication systems

Abstract

A significant advance in wireless communication technologies causes the emergence of the fourth-generation (4G) cellular communication systems, such as IEEE 802.16m and 3GPP LTE-Advanced. As the 4G systems provide a higher data rate than the second-generation (2G) and the third-generation (3G) systems, the usage pattern of mobile users in the 4G systems is changed from voice service to data service, such as high-quality multimedia streaming and broadband internet access over wireless networks. Furthermore, the amount of mobile traffic is exponentially growing because of the widespread distribution of intelligent mobile devices, which are called smart phones. Therefore, it is evident that the current 4G systems will be faced with a limitation with respect to system capacity in the near future. On the contrary, the demand of mobile users for seeking better quality of service will continue to increase. In consequence, such demand of mobile users will accelerate the development of the beyond 4G or the fifth-generation (5G) cellular communication systems.

In order to improve the performance of the 4G systems, many technologies are considered, for example, cooperative transmission and reception, advanced MIMO techniques, and femtocell networks. Among these technologies, we focus on the cooperative communication that aims at reducing intercell interference. Conventionally, a number of studies that deal with the cooperation of base stations (BSs) have been proposed and made a valuable contribution towards the performance improvement of the 4G systems. In these studies, a frequency reuse of one, in which all BSs share common radio resources for communication, is adopted. Therefore, the overall spectral efficiency is increased while the performance of cell-edge users is degraded, because they receive strong interference from neighboring cells. To solve such an intercell interference problem, we consider the cooperation of mobile users, or the direct communication betwe...