Intercell Interference Blindness in Fairness Optimizations

In the downlink of a cellular network with channel state information on a limited number of interference channels, the intercell interference (ICI) variance at a mobile device can change unpredictably. This ICI blindness leads to outages or a waste of resources because the link rate adaptation is based on an assumed signal to interference plus noise ratio. Different approaches to deal with ICI blindness have been discussed and compared with sum rate maximizations. In this paper, we extend the handling of the ICI blindness problem to fairness optimizations. Fairness scheduling realizes fairness over many time slots, which includes Round Robin, ThroughPut Fairness and Proportional Fairness. Algorithms are developed to combine the ICI robustness methods and fairness criteria and the performance of the different combinations are compared.