Coordinated resource allocation over heterogeneous wireless networks

Heterogeneous wireless networks are formed when a set of disparate transmission points serve a multitude of users over an available spectrum. In order to enable efficient resource allocation over such networks, the set of transmission points is partitioned into multiple clusters and each cluster is assigned a set of users that it must serve. Our contribution in this paper is the design of an approximation algorithm for the resource allocation in each cluster. We show that this resource allocation problem is strongly NP-hard and that our algorithm yields a constant factor approximation, for a fixed cluster size. Our evaluations over a realistic heterogeneous network model show that significant gains can be realized by our algorithm, provided the feedback available from the users is fully exploited.