Adaptive Sector Coloring Game for Geometric Network Information-Based Inter-Cell Interference Coordination in Wireless Cellular Networks

Inter-cell interference coordination (ICIC) is a promising technique to improve the performance of frequency-domain packet scheduling (FDPS) in downlink LTE/LTE-A networks. However, it is difficult to maximize the performance of FDPS using static ICIC schemes because of insufficient consideration of signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio distribution and user fairness. On the other hand, dynamic ICIC schemes based on channel state information (CSI) also have difficulty presented in the excessive signaling overhead and X2 interface latency. In order to overcome these drawbacks, we introduce a new concept of ICIC problem based on geometric network information (GNI) and propose an adaptive sector coloring game (ASCG) as a decentralized solution of the GNI-based ICIC problem. Furthermore, we develop an ASCG with a dominant strategy space noted as ASCG-D to secure a stable solution through proving the existence of Nash equilibrium. The proposed scheme provides better performance in terms of system throughput gain of up to about 44.1%, and especially of up to about 221% for the worst 10% users than static ICIC schemes. Moreover, the performance of the CSI-based ICIC, which require too much computational load and signaling overhead, is only 13.0% and 5.6% higher than that of ASCG-D regarding the total user throughput and the worst 10% user throughput, respectively. The most interesting outcome is that the signaling overhead of ASCG-D is 1/144 of dynamic ICIC schemes' one.