Cooperative interference-aware joint scheduling for the 3GPP LTE uplink

In current cellular networks base stations (BSs) usually perform independent scheduling without coordinating the resource allocation among different cells. This, however, often leads to high interference levels in cellular networks operating with universal frequency reuse, such as the 3GPP UTRAN Long Term Evolution (LTE). Coordinated scheduling between different BSs may mitigate this problem by taking interference from and to nearby BSs into account in order to avoid high interference situations, especially for user equipments (UEs) located near the cell-edge. For that purpose, we propose in this paper a novel interference-aware joint scheduling scheme based on proportional fairness for the uplink of a 3GPP UTRAN LTE system, where different BSs cooperate with each other via a fast backhaul network in order to jointly allocate frequency resources to the various UEs, taking the caused inter-cell interference into account. Furthermore, we propose an efficient method for dynamic interference coordination based on the standardized high interference indicator and we compare the achievable performance with this approach to a system with interference-aware joint scheduling. It is shown that our joint scheduling scheme outperforms a dynamic interference coordination scheme and that it yields significant gains over a conventional LTE Release 8 system without any interference coordination.