BASICS, Scheduling Base Stations to Mitigate Interferences in Cellular Networks

Abstract

The continuously increasing demand for higher data rates results in increasing network density, so that inter-cell interference is becoming the most serious obstacle towards spectral efficiency. Considering that radio resources are limited and expensive, new techniques are required for the next generation of cellular networks, to enable a more efficient way to allocate and use radio resources. In this framework, we target the design of a frequency reuse 1 scheme, which exploits the coordination between base stations as a tool to mitigate intercell interference. While common approaches proposed in the literature focus on the optimal user scheduling, we tackle the problem from a different angle. In particular, we formulate a base station scheduling problem to decide whether a base station is allowed to transmit to any of its users in a given sub-frame, without causing excessive interference to any of the users of other scheduled base stations. To this aim, we show that finding the optimal base station scheduling is NP-hard, and formulate the BASICS (BAse Station Inter-Cell Scheduling) algorithm, a novel heuristic to approximate the optimal solution at low complexity cost. By means of numerical and packet-level simulations, we prove the effectiveness and reliability of the proposed solution as compared to the state of the art of inter-cell interference mitigation schemes.