Coordinated scheduling for wireless backhaul networks with soft frequency reuse

Coordinated resource allocation is a topic of significant interest for emerging wireless networks. This paper proposes and examines the benefits of coordinated scheduling in soft frequency reuse (SFR) based systems. Consider the downlink of a 3-sector-per-cell SFR-based wireless backhaul network consisting of N access nodes (ANs), each serving K remote terminals (RTs) multiplexed across the K time/frequency zones, with frequency reuse one between the sectors. Assuming a fixed transmit power, the paper considers the resource allocation problem of optimally scheduling each of the NK RTs to one of the NK power-zones, on a one-to-one basis, and in a coordinated manner, as opposed to conventional systems which schedule the RTs one at a time in an uncoordinated way. The paper solves the problem using the auction method, which offers a close-to-global-optimal solution. The paper further proposes heuristic methods with lower computational complexity. Simulation results show that coordinated scheduling offers significant performance improvement as compared to non-coordinated systems.