Multi-Cell Cooperative Scheduling for Network Utility Maximization With User Equipment Side Interference Cancellation

Abstract

Downlink inter-cell interference is a major limiting factor in current cellular systems. Several trends exacerbate the interference problem: cells become denser, more heterogeneous, and are more randomly deployed. To tackle this problem, there are many pure network-side solutions proposed, e.g., eICIC and feICIC in 3GPP LTE. However, these solutions are less spectrally efficient because the interferer usually needs to mute or reduce power to keep its interference power to victims below a tolerable level. In this paper, we consider an alternative solution in which the user equipment may perform interference cancellation (IC). In theory, this is a more spectrally efficient scheme as compared with the pure network-side solutions. In practice, however, to fully exploit the benefit of IC, the network should adopt some IC-aware scheduling rules. We propose a multi-cell joint scheduling, joint rate selection and power allocation problem in an IC-enabled network, trying to maximize the network utility. To make our solutions practical and readily deployable, we consider different settings. We explore both theoretically optimal IC scheme and the more practical symbol-level IC. On the other hand, we propose both dynamic and semi-static solutions, and compare them. Our simulation results show that while the average throughput increases by only around 10%, cell edge users can gain more than 50%.