Decentralized Intercell Interference Coordination in Uplink Cellular Networks using Adaptive Sub-Band Exclusion

In this paper, we propose an adaptive sub-band exclusion (ASE) scheme as a means of intercell interference coordination (ICIC) technique to improve the performance of wireless cellular systems in a decentralized manner. Since ICIC is performed at each mobile station (MS), the proposed ASE scheme can be classified as a decentralized ICIC scheme. Compared to conventional centralized ICIC schemes, our proposed decentralized ASE scheme has the following advantages: cell and user coordinations are easier in the proposed ASE scheme, the complexity of ICIC at base stations (BSs) is reduced, and frequency selectivity characteristics of interference channels to neighboring base stations can be utilized in ICIC. Using the ASE scheme, each MS first finds which neighboring BS suffers most from the interference induced by the MS. Then, it determines an exclusion ratio alpha according to how much intercell interference the MS induces to the selected BS. Finally, it excludes alpha of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) sub-bands under the consideration of the frequency characteristics of the channel between the selected BS and itself. Through extensive computer simulations, we show that the proposed ASE scheme is effective in improving cell edge user performance by eight times at a reasonable degradation of average user performance.