Joint cell muting and user scheduling in multicell networks with temporal fairness

A semicentralized joint cell muting and user scheduling scheme for interference coordination in a multicell network is proposed under two different temporal fairness criteria. In the proposed scheme, at a decision instant, each base station (BS) in the multicell network employs a cell-level scheduler to nominate one user for each of its inner and outer sections and their available transmission rates to a network-level scheduler which then computes the potential overall transmission rate for each muting pattern. Subsequently, the network-level scheduler selects one pattern to unmute, out of all the available patterns. This decision is shared with all cell-level schedulers which then forward data to one of the two nominated users provided the pattern they reside in was chosen for transmission. Both user and pattern selection decisions are made on a temporal fair basis. Although some pattern sets are easily obtainable from static frequency reuse systems, we propose a general pattern set construction algorithm in this paper. As for the first fairness criterion, all cells are assigned to receive the same temporal share with the ratio between the temporal share of a cell center section and that of the cell edge section being set to a fixed desired value for all cells. The second fairness criterion is based on max-min temporal fairness for which the temporal share of the network-wide worst case user is maximized. Extensive numerical results are provided to validate the effectiveness of the proposed schemes and to study the impact of choice of the pattern set.