Interference Mitigation and Traffic Adaptation Using Cell Clustering For LTE-TDD Systems

Dynamic time-division duplex (TDD) mode has been suggested to be used in LTE systems for small-sized cells with asymmetric traffic. Despite its flexibility, the TDD mode suffers from sophisticated interference patterns, i.e. mobile-tomobile and Base station-to-Base Station interference. In order to solve this problem, the 3GPP has specified a set of methods for interference mitigation and traffic adaptation (IMTA). Cell clustering is one of these methods, where cells are organized in clusters. Inside each cluster, cells shall have the same frame configuration. The cells are assigned to clusters using specified rules that have to take into account interference levels and traffic asymmetry. In this paper, we propose methods for cell clustering in the context of IMTA. Simulation results have shown that the proposed methods outperform existing methods, especially in uplink.