Proportional Fairness for Overlapping Cells in Wireless Networks

Coordination of cellular base stations (BS) with overlapping coverage enables joint optimization of radio resource allocation in a multiple cell environment. This paper extends existing Proportional Fairness model for wired networks and single wireless cell, to the context of multiple (probably heterogeneous) wireless cells with overlapping coverage. The proposed fair allocation achieves both global Pareto optimality and inter- cell fairness (load balance). However, the ideal allocation is not practical as it requires a mobile station (MS) be simultaneously associated with multiple BSs. Instead, we use a simple GLS (Greedy Logarithmic Sum) scheme, which associates each new arrival MS with only one BS, to approximate the optimal allocation. Simulation result shows that GLS performs close to optimal scheme in a wide range of network settings.