Inter-Cell Interference Management for Next-Generation Wireless Communication Systems

In this paper, we examine what changes the next-generation wireless communication systems will experience in terms of the technologies, services, and networks and, based on that, we investigate how the inter-cell interference management should evolve in various aspects. We identify that the main driving forces of the future changes involve the data-centric services, new dynamic service scenarios, all-IP core access networks, new physical-layer technologies, and heavy upload traffic. We establish that in order to cope with the changes, the next-generation inter-cell interference management should evolve to 1) set the objective of providing a maximal data rate, 2) take the form of joint management of power allocation and user scheduling, 3) operate in a fully distributed manner, 4) handle the time-varying channel conditions in mobile environment, 5) deal with the changes in interference mechanism triggered by the new physical-layer technologies, and 6) increase the spectral efficiency while avoiding centralized coordination of resource allocation of the users in the uplink channel.