A base station (BS) comprises: an interface to receive radio resource management (RRM) measurement from user equipment on received reference signal (RS) strength for each BS of one or more other BSs in a surrounding area of the user equipment; an X2 interface to receive transmission information of almost blank subframes and corresponding cell-specific reference signal (CRS) resource element (RE) locations from the one or more other BSs; and a controller to manage bit-level PDSCH (Physical Downlink Shared Channel) muting information, which includes identifying PDSCH resource elements (REs) that suffer the most from CRS interference arising from other BSs and that are to be subjected to bit-level muting, and allocating to the identified REs a number of bits less than the number of bits allocated to normal REs, and to transfer data with the two levels of bit allocations to various PDSCH REs to the user equipment.