Improving Resource Efficiency with Partial Resource Muting for Dense Wireless Networks

Achieving good tradeoff between the resource reuse and the interference avoidance is the key challenge for 5G dense wireless networks. In this paper we analyze the resource utilization region and determine the transition point of the load budget in which the networks move from an efficient noise-limited resource utilization region to an inefficient interference-limited resource utilization region. The analysis is based on the fundamental performance limits of solutions to max-min utility fairness problems derived by the asymptotic behavior of the solutions as the load budget approaches infinity. An asymptotic load-related metric is leveraged to develop an efficient partial resource muting scheme, which partitions the resource set to muting region and reuse region in each cell, rapidly detects the set of bottleneck users, and optimizes the user-centric resource allocation. The numerical results show a significant performance gain of the resource muting scheme, compared to the optimal solution to the max-min utility fairness problem with full frequency reuse. The gain is more significant as the network gets denser.