On Distributed and Coordinated Resource Allocation for Interference Mitigation in Self-Organizing LTE Networks

In order to mitigate inter-cell interference in Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) based cellular networks, we propose a distributed and coordinated radio resource allocation algorithm for cellular networks to self-organize into efficient and stable frequency reuse patterns. In the proposed radio resource allocation algorithm, each cell independently and dynamically allocates Modulation and Coding Scheme (MCS), Resource Block (RB) and transmit power to its users in a way that its total DownLink (DL) transmit power is minimized, while users' throughput demands are satisfied. In addition, each cell informs neighboring cells of the RBs that have been scheduled for its cell-edge users' DL transmissions through message passing. Accordingly, the neighboring cells will abstain from assigning high power levels to the specified RBs. Extensive simulation results attempt to demonstrate that DL power control on a per RB basis may play a key role in future networks, and show that the distributed minimization of DL transmit power at each cell, supported by inter-cell coordination, is able to provide a 20 % improvement of network throughput, considerably reduced the number of user outages, and significantly enhanced spatial reuse, as compared with cutting-edge resource allocation schemes.