Experimental evaluation of interference rejection combining for 5G small cells

Abstract

The Interference Rejection Combining (IRC) receiver can significantly boost the network throughput in scenarios characterized by dense uncoordinated deployment of small cells, as targeted by future 5th generation (5G) radio access technology. This paper presents an experimental study on the potential benefit of IRC receiver in real deployment scenarios. The study is carried out using a software defined radio (SDR) testbed network with four cells, each featuring one Access Point (AP) and one User Equipment (UE) with two antennas. The testbed network was placed in an indoor office and open hall scenarios, respectively. In each scenario, the cells were arranged to characterize the propagation in different spatial configurations. Using the obtained propagation data, we analysed the cases of closed and open subscriber group for the respective scenarios, to compare the achievable throughput with IRC and Maximum Ratio Combining (MRC) receivers. Different frequency reuse schemes were also considered. The throughput results confirm the effectiveness of the IRC receiver in improving the network throughput with respect to the MRC receiver, under the assumption of single stream (rank 1) transmission. Results show average gains up to around 40% and outage gains up to 70% over the MRC receiver. The combination of the IRC receiver and frequency reuse achieves a favourable trade-off between the network throughput and fairness. Overall, due to the direct propagation, the open hall open subscriber group scenario is benefiting the most from the ability of the IRC receiver to cancel a strong dominant interferer.

Multi-Connectivity for Ultra-Reliable Communication in Industrial Scenarios

“…Once the assignations have been done, the CTFs measured by the UEs are used to obtain the downlink KPIs (SINR and throughput). The SINR is calculated according to the receiver type, by following the same approach as in [20], and then mapped to Shannon throughput. A single transmission stream (rank 1) per UE is assumed by the transmit nodes.…”

Walsh–Hadamard Transform Based Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) and Interference Rejection Combining in Next-Generation HetNets

“…Similarly, a study on the performance of IRC in fifth-generation (5G) networks was performed in [11,12]. According to our knowledge, limited work has been performed on IRC related to HetNets, especially considering the hybrid-access mechanism, the studies of which include: Investigation of IRC receiver for LTE HetNets [13] and experimental evaluation of IRC in 5G HetNets [14,15] In recent years, NOMA has attracted a substantial amount of research in the field of wireless communication because of its potential to enhance the network capacity manifold [16][17][18][19][20]. NOMA achieves this by multiplexing multiple user transmission signals into a single transmission stream by exploiting the power domain.…”