QoS-Guaranteed Radio Resource Allocation with Distributed Inter-Cell Interference Coordination for Multi-Cell OFDMA Systems

This paper proposes a novel distributed QoS-guaranteed multi-cell radio resource allocation (RRA) scheme for OFDMA systems, which includes two separate steps operated on two time levels: the Hungarian algorithm based intra-cell fast scheduling on the frame level and the X2 interface based inter-cell interference coordination (ICIC) algorithm performed on the super-frame level. The scheme is distributed in the sense that both algorithms are carried out by the enhanced Node B (eNB). Through intense analysis, we proved that the ICIC algorithm not only provides fine robustness against ICI but also achieves good load balancing from a new perspective. Simulation results indicate that the performance of the proposed scheme, when compared to the standard "universal reuse" approach without inter-cell coordination, is significantly better in terms of increasing both the network and cell-edge throughputs.