• The Journal of Korean Institute of Electromagnetic Engineering and Science
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• v.25 no.6
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• pp.653-663
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• 2014

To cope with an increasing amount of data traffic, research efforts are being made to maximize the data rate by reducing the interference between the transmission nodes. This paper also focuses on interference control schemes utilizing antenna sub-array beam-forming. The first scheme relies on horizontal beam rotation which utilizes three types of narrow beam patterns. Different beam patterns are applied to transmit signals in rotating fashion to control the interference. The second scheme is based on user-specific sub-array beamforming, which uses the precoding matrix based on users' location and controls the amount of interference in the multi-user environment. The performance of the proposed schemes is evaluated using the computer simulation to demonstrate the performance enhancement.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.50 no.11
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• pp.12-20
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• 2013

Even though extensive research results have been applied to wireless cellular systems to improve their capacity and coverage, severe performance degradation experienced in cell boundary areas still remains as a major limiting factor to prohibit further improvement of user equipment (UE) throughput. In the Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) standard of the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), Some advanced techniques have been introduced to overcome this "cell-edge problem", including coordinated multipoint transmission and reception (CoMP) and inter-cell interference coordination (ICIC). In this paper, we propose yet another strategy to improve the performance of low-tier UEs by using the concept of multiple beam direction patterns (BDPs). Such multiple BDPs can be implemented using multi-layer antenna arrays stacked vertically at base station (BS) sites to transmit signals in different main beam directions. In comparison to conventional three-sector antennas with a fixed beam pattern, the proposed methods makes signal transmission in a rotational fashion to significantly enhance the reception quality of UEs located near sector (or cell) edge areas, preventing the situation where certain UEs are marginally covered by the BS for the whole transmission time. Performance evaluation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the conventional three-sector transmission by 171% in low 5% UEs in terms of the UE throughput.