Adaptive multi-pattern reuse in multi-cell networks

Achieving sufficient spatial capacity gain by having small cells requires careful treatment of inter-cell interference (ICI) management via BS power coordination coupled with user scheduling inside cells. Optimal algorithms have been known to be hard to implement due to high computation and signaling overheads. We propose joint pattern-based ICI management and user scheduling algorithms that are practically implementable. The basic idea is to decompose the original problem into two sub-problems, where we run ICI management at a slower time scale than user scheduling. We empirically show that even with such a slow tracking of system dynamics at the ICI management part, the decomposed approach achieves high performance increase, compared to a conventional universal reuse scheme.