“Wireless networks without edges”: Dynamic radio resource clustering and user scheduling

Cellular systems using Coordinated Multi-Point (CoMP) transmissions leveraging clusters of spatially distributed radio antennas as Virtual Base Stations (VBSs) have the potential to realize overall throughput gains and, perhaps more importantly, can deliver substantial enhancement to poor performing “edge” users. In this paper we propose a novel framework aimed at fully exploiting the potential of such systems through dynamic radio resource clustering and user scheduling which maximize system utility. The dynamic clustering problem is modeled as a maximum weight clustering problem which is NP-hard, however, we show that by structuring the set of possible VBSs to be “2-decomposable” it can be efficiently computed. We also propose to optimize over a class of power allocation policies to radio resources, and thus VBSs, which allow dynamic user scheduling and flexible power allocations depending on instantaneous channel realizations. We use simulation to compare our approach with a state-of-the-art baseline which exploits dynamic frequency reuse and opportunistic user scheduling, but no clustering, and show edge users' throughput gains are as high as 80% without degrading the performance of others.