Radio link montoring measurements on restricted subframes in heterogeneous LTE-advanced system

The user equipments (UE) shall monitor the downlink radio link quality, which depends on physical downlink control channel (PDCCH) block error rate (BLER), and provides feedback to the eNodeB. In heterogeneous networks, since a number of low power nodes are overlaid by a Macro cell and the unbalanced transmitting power are provided between different cell layers, the control channels would suffer more serious interference than in the case of homogeneous networks. Release 8/9 inter-cell interference coordination (ICIC) techniques are not fully effective in mitigating control channel interference. This paper gives a time domain solution for ICIC and presents link level simulations on the radio link monitoring (RLM) performance for legacy Release 8/9 terminals in the case Macro eNodeB interference, and propose that the sufferable interference level for RLM performance.