Interference-aware radio resource management framework for the 3GPP LTE uplink with QoS constraints

We propose and evaluate the performance of an integrated quality-of-service (QoS) aware radio resource management (RRM) framework for LTE uplink access. Unlike related work, our integrated RRM framework jointly takes into account 1) the class of service requirements of the different connections, 2) the constraints on the contiguity in resource block allocation due to the single-carrier frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA) mechanism adopted for the LTE uplink, and 3) the selection of the appropriate modulation and coding scheme with full integration with the LTE uplink closed-loop fractional power control for proper power allocation. The proposed RRM framework uses closed loop power control and interference limit per cell to provide an autonomous inter-cell interference coordination scheme that is applied locally without the need of exchanging interference related information between neighboring cells. Simulation results show the ability of the proposed framework to meet the QoS of a highly loaded system with four classes of service. The interference-aware scheme also manages to limit interference and provides fair resource sharing between cell-edge and cell-center users.