Contents I. Introduction
Next generation cellular systems promise significantly higher cell throughput and improved spectral efficiency as compared to existing systems such as GSM, EDGE, and HSPA+ (High-Speed Packet Access Release 7). For example, system performance requirements for the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Long Term Evolution (LTE) of UMTS [1] and LTE-Advanced [2] target significant improvements in cell-edge spectral efficiency and peak transmission rates that can reach, respectively, 0.04–0.06 bps/Hz/cell and 100 Mbps and beyond. In order to achieve these targets, dense frequency reuse of the scarce radio spectrum allocated to the system is needed. Efficient use of radio spectrum is also important from a cost-of-service point of view, where the number of served users is an important factor. However, as the frequency reuse increases, so does the interference caused by other users using the same channels. Therefore, interference becomes a decisive factor that limits the system capacity, and hence, the suppression of such interference becomes of a particular importance to the design of next generation cellular networks.
