Improved link adaptation with coordinated scheduling in non-fully loaded wireless networks

In mobile communication networks under bursty traffic conditions the interference experienced by the users varies constantly. Therefore, the periodic reporting of channel state information becomes inaccurate and the link adaptation performance deteriorates. In this work, a coordinated scheduling scheme is proposed to improve the link adaptation performance of a non-fully loaded network in the downlink. For that purpose an integer linear program is formulated which, at the time of scheduling a user, targets to reproduce the interference scenario as observed during the generation of the channel state information report. Although combinatorial in nature, the proposed optimization framework is suitable for even middle to large scale networks. Extensive system level simulation results show a reduction of the block error rate, i.e., the improvement of the link adaptation performance, achieved by the proposed coordinated scheduling scheme compared with a scheduler that does not benefit from cooperation.