eICIC Configuration Algorithm with Service Scalability in Heterogeneous Cellular Networks

Interference management is one of the most important issues in heterogeneous cellular networks with multiple macro and pico cells. The enhanced inter cell interference coordination (eICIC) has been proposed to protect downlink pico cell transmissions by mitigating interference from neighboring macro cells. Therefore, the adaptive eICIC configuration problem is critical, which adjusts the parameters including the ratio of almost blank subframes (ABS) and the bias of cell range expansion (RE). This problem is challenging especially for the scenario with multiple coexisting network services, since different services have different user scheduling strategies and different evaluation metrics. By using a general service model, we formulate the eICIC configuration problem with multiple coexisting services as a general form consensus problem with regularization and solve the problem by proposing an efficient optimization algorithm based on the alternating direction method of multipliers. In particular, we perform local RE bias adaptation at service layer, local ABS ratio adaptation at BS layer, and coordination among local solutions for a global solution at a network layer. To provide the service scalability, we encapsulate the service details into the local RE bias adaptation subproblem, which is isolated from the other parts of the algorithm, and we also introduce some implementation examples of the subproblem for different services. The extensive simulation results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed algorithm and verify the convergence property.