In evolving fifth generation (5G), some demands that to be addressed are improved data rate, increased capacity, decreased latency and better quality of service. Heterogeneous networks (HetNets) is considered as an effective way to meet these prime objectives. Deployment of HetNets faces a number of challenges, among which interference management is of much importance. This chapter has summarized the major challenges and solutions of interference management. Interference cancellation, avoidance and coordination are discussed in detail, including enhanced intercell Interference Coordination (eICIC), Coordinated Multi-point Transmission (CoMP) et al. In addition, the future challenges of interference management have also been presented.
TopBackground
The 1st generation was announced in 1983 by Ameritech company in Chicago, America (Boucher, 2001;Frenkiel, 2010), which was analog system and called Advanced Mobile Phone System(AMPS).This was the first time that the thought of cells was applied.
The 2nd generation (2G) was a digital communication system. With the vigorous development of digital circuit technology, analog communication was gradually replaced by digital communication. Digital communication system has greater system capacity, lower equipment cost, volume and processing speed.Vital eminent technologies were GSM, Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) and IS-95 (Halonen, Romero, & Melero, 2002; Santhi, Srivastava, Senthilkumaran, & Butare 2003). In order to offer data services, General Packet Radio Services(GPRS) was merged into 2G, which was called 2.5G.
The 3rd generation was established in late 2000. It imparts transmission rate up to 2Mbps. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) chose three types of 3G in a variety of selection: wideband code division multiple access, which is WCDMA (Harte, 2004), cdma2000 (Vanghi, Damnjanovic, Harte, Vojcic, 2004) and Time Division-Synchronous Code Division Multiple Access, TD-SCDMA (Li, 2003). Compared with 2G, 3G has a faster transmission rate, and provides more convenient wireless applications. Long-Term Evolution technology (LTE) and Fixed Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WIMAX) are the future of mobile data services, which are called 3.75G and featured by better coverage with improved performance for less cost (Andrews, Ghosh, & Muhamed, 2007; Furht & Ahson, 2007; Sesia, Toufik & Baker, 2009).
3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) is presently standardizing Long Term Evolution (LTE) Advanced as forthcoming 4G standard along with WIMAX. A 4G system improves the prevailing communication networks by imparting a complete and reliable solution based on IP.
The LTE we usually say is LTE release 8. OFDM and MIMO were introduced into LTE R8, and throughput on 100 Mbps is realized on 20 MHz bandwidth. But LTE R8 is not 4G standard. It is called 3.9G. The real 4G standard is LTE Release 10 and above 10, which is called LTE-Advanced and is the improved version of R8. It is adopted in R10 that enhanced MIMO, distributed antennas, repeaters, carrier aggregation and so on. And the maximum throughput can be 1Gbps on the bandwidth of 100MHz in LTE-A.
Interference has been a serious problem of wireless communication performance ever since 1G emerged. With the rapid development of wireless communication, controlling and reducing interference effectively becomes more and more urgent. Especially in recent years, more and more attention has been payed to it.