Power control in distributed cooperative OFDMA cellular networks

This paper addresses downlink cooperation at a system level. Cooperation between base stations is an alternative to macrodiversity to provide QoS continuity in case of mobility. We propose a radio resource management strategy for the relay channel, made of relayed users identification, resource allocation and power control in an OFDMA-based system. Four scheduling methods are tested for power allocation in inter-cell interference environment: globally optimal, proportional fair, harmonic mean fair and max-min fair. Cooperation brings additional gain, both in terms of throughput and fairness, with all fair schedulers.