A beam-based eICIC algorithm

To improve throughput, 5G networks adopts beamforming technique and have high small-cell-density deployment. In Time Division Duplex (TDD) based 5G networks, Almost Blank Subframes (ABS) scheme and Cell Range Expansion (CRE) scheme are adopted to reduce inter-cell interference and to achieve inter-cell load balancing, respectively. However, existing ABS allocation and CRE are cell-based, i.e., requires that all beams inside a cell adopting the same ABS allocation. Due to the multiple overlapping of small cells, such cell-based ABS/CRE may much reduce the throughput. In this paper, we proposed a beam-based ABS allocation and beam-based CRE. To further reduce the interference, in this paper, small cell center UEs and small cell edge UEs (those UEs connects to small cell due to CRE technique) have distinct downlink schedules. According to our simulation results, our scheme have low computation cost since the computation cost of beam-based is much lower than cell-based.