Mitigation of Inter-cell Interference in an Industrial Communication Network by Coordinated Scheduling

Sammanfattning: With Industry 4.0, the manufacturing industries are transitioning from wired to wireless communication between machines which put high demands on the network system. This can be achieved with the fifth generation (5G) of wireless communication by utilizing two fundamental key features in New Radio (NR), Massive Machine-Type Communication (mMTC) and Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communication (URLLC). To handle the increased network load that comes with mMTC, multiple cells may need to be implemented, which introduces Inter-Cell Interference (ICI) to the network system. The added ICI may reduce the overall performance of the system. The aim of this thesis was to investigate if the number of devices could be increased while maintaining a high reliability. The objective was to mitigate uplink ICI by coordinating schedulers between two cells in an industrial communication network. The coordination feature was implemented in an already existing Ericsson AB simulator. The approach was to identify devices that contributed more to the ICI by using the Reference Signal Received Power (RSRP) measurement. These devices were then allocated frequency resources in a protected frequency band which restricted the other cell from allocating on the same frequency resources in the same uplink slot. The results showed that by coordinating the schedulers between two cells, a 10 \% increase in the number of devices could be achieved while upholding a reliability of 99.9 \%.