Decentralized intercell interference coordination for fair resource allocation in large-scale networks

Cellular networks with a dense reuse of spectrum strongly suffer from intercell interference (ICI). By coordinating the resource allocations (RA) of the individual base stations (BS) the ICI can be effectively mitigated. Since centralized ICI coordination schemes become prohibitive in large-scale networks, we propose a decentralized RA procedure that coordinates the local RA steps among the BSs. Our scheme efficiently suppresses the so-called domino effect where a RA step of a single BS may impact the entire network by causing a large number of subsequent RA adaptations at remote BSs. The objective of our proposed RA procedure is to provide high degrees of fairness among the users. Since such an objective usually results in poor overall system performance (e.g. high blocking rates) we extended the RA procedure for a cooperative user detection scheme that employs an ICI cancellation. The results indicate significant gains in user fairness for both cases, ICI coordination based on short-term as well as long-term channel statistics.