Joint Cell Assignment and Scheduling for Centralized Baseband Architectures

This study considers a downlink cell association and scheduling mechanism for an LTE-Advanced network with a centralized architecture, featuring a central baseband (BB) pool and distributed small cells at the remote site. In the proposed solution, the BB pool determines the user-cell association to increase the network performance. A simple suboptimal algorithm with reduced complexity is used on a per time instant basis. The challenges associated to the user measurement reports and the interference variablity are discussed. Compared to the usual case where users connect to the cell providing the highest received power and scheduling is performed independently within the cells, the proposed algorithm can provide up to a 70% median data rate gain.