Aeroflex Limited announced that it has added support for enhanced Inter Cell Interference Cancellation (eICIC) to the TM500 Test Mobile platform. Functionality for testing carrier aggregation was added to the platform earlier this year. eICIC is an enhanced inter-cell interference coordination technique specifically designed to improve the overall performance of HetNet deployments, and is one of the main features specified for LTE-Advanced in 3GPP Release10.
The main application of eICIC is to improve cell edge performance and coverage in HetNet deployment scenarios where nodes of different types—macro-, micro- and picocells—have coverage areas that partially overlap. The enhancement to the TM500 Test Mobile platform also allows engineers developing and testing LTE base stations to integrate and validate the eICIC feature and to verify the advantages of heterogeneous deployments.
