Joint Scheduling and Fast Cell Selection in OFDMA Wireless Networks

In modern broadband cellular networks, the omnidirectional antenna at each cell is replaced by three or six directional antennas, one in every sector. While every sector can run its own scheduling algorithm, bandwidth utilization can be significantly increased if a joint scheduler makes these decisions for all the sectors. This gives rise to a new problem, referred to as “joint scheduling,” addressed in this paper for the first time. The problem is proven to be NP-hard, but we propose efficient algorithms with a worst-case performance guarantee for solving it. We then show that the proposed algorithms indeed substantially increase the network throughput.