Inter-cell interference coordination using frequency block dependent transmission power control and PF scheduling in non-orthogonal access with SIC for cellular uplink

This paper proposes an inter-cell interference coordination (ICIC) method using frequency block-dependent transmission power control (TPC) and proportional fair (PF) scheduling in non-orthogonal access with minimum mean squared error-based linear filtering followed by a successive interference canceller (MMSE-SIC) in the cellular uplink. The proposed method uses TPC coordinated among neighboring cells based on frequency block-dependent parameters. Under this transmission power setting, the use of PF scheduling achieves the ICIC effect. In conventional fractional frequency reuse (FFR) for ICIC in the uplink, users within a cell are categorized into cell-interior and cell-edge user groups and each user group can access only a portion of the frequency blocks. This degrades the multiuser diversity gain and the throughput gain due to non-orthogonal user multiplexing, which is in general increased when the users with largely different channel conditions are multiplexed into the same frequency block. Since all the users within a cell can access all frequency blocks in the proposed method, the method abates the drawbacks of conventional FFR. Simulation results show that non-orthogonal access employing an MMSE-SIC using the proposed ICIC method significantly enhances the system-level throughput performance compared to conventional FFR. We also show the performance gain of non-orthogonal access employing the MMSE-SIC compared to orthogonal access, which is widely used in 3.9 and 4G mobile communication systems.