By A Nigerian University, the Nnamdi Azikiwe University has made a major technology development breakthrough in the design of the fifth-generation mobile communication system.
The Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering of the University through the sponsorship of a research work by the Nigerian Communications Commission, under the title “The Development of a User-Centric Based Clustering Scheme and Spatial Resource Allocation Technique for Mitigation of Interference in 5G Networks” discovered that the spectral efficiency of a 5G network can be improved by increasing the number of antenna elements in the base stations and increasing the number of users the antenna elements are utilized to serve simultaneously.
According to the report, that would be after the significant interfering signals emanating from neighbouring base stations are dealt with using our devised methods: A user-centric clustering scheme and an optimal resource allocation scheme.
Five summary of the findings observed a theoretical minimum achievable spectral efficiency which is 30 bits/s/Hz at the
following baseline parameters: Base station having 4 antenna elements, serving 4 users at SNR of 30dB.
While highlighting the reasons for the study, the group researchers led by Engr. Obinna Oguejiofor stated that the 5G cellular network promises to perform better than its predecessor (1G, 2G, 3G, and 4G) in terms of delivering high data rate, improved quality of experience (QoE), high spectral efficiency (SE), improved energy efficiency (EE).
According to the study, as the reuse-one deployment of 5G is gradually taking shape all over the world, achieving spectral
efficiency and tackling inter-cell interference have become some of the greatest challenges encountered because they reduce user equipment (UE) performance and the overall system performance.
“Many interference-mitigating schemes have been developed to solve the issue of inter-cell interference, however, while these interference-mitigating techniques improve the performance of the system, some do sacrifice the aggregate spectral efficiency of the system”, the researchers said.
On how they achieved the feat, they said: “to achieve that, we devised a user-centric-based dynamic clustering scheme, which can determine the optimum number of base stations (BSs) that are interfering with a particular user at a particular time.
“After this is determined, the interfered user sends a report containing channel state information (CSI) belonging to all interfering BSs to its serving base station, requesting it to cooperate with these interfering BSs to coordinate their resource allocations (RA) in terms of spatial directions to mitigate the inter-cell interference.
“To validate the resource allocation algorithm devised in this work, a transmitter incorporating a multi-antenna system was designed and developed using software-defined radio and other techniques to validate the algorithm”, the study stated.
Oguejiofor’s team assured that the result will help in achieving improved quality of experience most especially for UEs at cell edges or cell range expansion areas and also improve the overall system-wide spectral efficiency adding that the result This will be beneficial to the network service providers as well as the mobile network subscribers.
