A. Abd Manaf et al. (Eds.): ICIEIS 2011, Part III, CCIS 253, pp. 654–665, 2011. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011 Inter-cell Interference Mitigation and Coordination in CoMP Systems Norshidah Katiran, Norsheila Fisal, Sharifah Kamilah Syed Yusof, Siti Marwangi Mohamad Maharum, Aimi Syamimi Ab Ghafar, and Faiz Asraf Saparudin UTM-MIMOS CoE Telecommunication Technology, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, 81310 Skudai, Johor, Malaysia norshida@uthm.edu.my, {sheila,kamilah}@fke.utm.my, smarwangi@yahoo.com, {aimisyamimi,faiz.asraf}@gmail.com Abstract. Coordinated Multi-Point (CoMP) transmission and reception is seen as a promising technology to achieve higher spectral efficiency in LTE- Advanced systems. Base stations cooperation can be one of the most important enabling technologies beneficial in scenarios with high inter-cell interference (ICI). In this paper, interference mitigation and coordination schemes in CoMP are being discussed. Simulation study to show the significant effect of ICI to cell-edge performance is presented. In this work, we proposed an interference cancellation scheme with minimal backhaul requirements in addition to existing inter-cell interference coordination (ICIC) schemes. Keywords: CoMP, ICI, eNB, coordination. 1 Introduction The goal of LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) standard is to further enhance system data rates and spectral efficiency while supporting backward compatibility with LTE Release 8. As part of LTE-A standard development, several enhancements including support for up to 100 MHz bandwidth and higher- order MIMO are being investigated to meet the IMT-advanced requirements [1]. An important requirement for the LTE-A system is to improve cell-edge performance and throughput. Unlike the other cellular system (e.g., CDMA) which has robust interference capability, OFDM-based cellular system (e.g., WiMAX, LTE, LTE-A) suffers from ICI at the cell boundary, especially when all frequency channels are fully reused [2]. Therefore, some means of mitigating the ICI is required to support a full frequency-reuse operation. This problem has attracted much attention and some strategies have been proposed in order to improve cell edge performance. Recently, cooperative communications (e.g., base stations, relays) have been studied extensively to exploit diversity in order to achieve better network performance [2-4]. As for LTE-A systems, Coordinated Multi-Point transmission and reception (CoMP) has been proposed as one of the key technology to enhance cell average and cell edge throughput. CoMP refers to a system where the transmission and/or