A First Look at Inter-Cell Interference in the Wild

In cellular networks, inter-cell interference management has been studied for decades, yet its real-world effectiveness remains under-explored. To bridge this gap, we conduct a first measurement study of inter-cell interference for operational 4G/5G networks. Our findings reveal the prevalence of inter-cell interference and a surprising absence of interference coordination among operational base stations (BSs). As a result, user equipments (UEs) experience unnecessary interference, which causes significant signal quality degradation, especially under frequency-selective channel fading. We examine the inter-cell interference issues from four major perspectives: (1) network deployment, (2) channel assignment, (3) time-frequency resource allocation, and (4) network configuration. In none of these dimensions is inter-cell interference effectively managed. Notably, even when spectrum resources are underutilized and simple strategies could effectively mitigate inter-cell interference, BSs consistently prioritize using the same set of time-frequency resources, causing interference across cells. Our measurements reveal substantial opportunities for improving signal quality by inter-cell interference management.