System level simulation and radio resource management for distributed antenna systems with cognitive radio and multi-cell cooperation

The performance of wireless networks will experience a considerable improvement by the use of novel technologies such as distributed antenna systems (DASs), multi-cell cooperation (MCC), and cognitive radio (CR). These solutions have shown considerable gains at the physical-layer (PHY). However, several issues remain open in the system-level evaluation, radio resource management (RRM), and particularly in the design of billing/licensing schemes for this type of system. This paper proposes a system-level simulator (SLS) that will help in addressing these issues. The paper focuses on the description of the modules of a generic SLS that need a modification to cope with the new transmission/economic paradigms. An advanced RRM solution is proposed for a multi-cell DAS with two levels of cooperation: inside the cell (intra-cell) to coordinate the transmission of distributed nodes within the cell, and between cells (inter-cell or MCC) to adapt cell transmissions according to the collected inter-cell interference measurements. The RRM solution blends network and financial metrics using the theory of multi- objective portfolio optimization. The core of the RRM solution is an iterative weighted least squares (WLS) optimization algorithm that aims to schedule in a fair manner as many terminals as possible across all the radio resources of the available frequency bands (licensed and non-licensed), while considering different economic metrics. The RRM algorithm includes joint terminal scheduling, link adaptation, space division multiplexing, spectrum selection, and resource allocation.