Distributed Resource Allocation with Inter-cell Interference Coordination in OFDMA Uplink

In this paper, we propose a distributed resource allocation mechanism with inter-cell interference (ICI) coordination for practical orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) uplink. The designed scheme combines soft frequency reuse (SFR) and interference limited power control of neighboring cells. It avoids severe interference to neighboring cells through adjusting the interference limited power constraints according to the load variations across cells. The computational complexity is greatly lowered by decomposing a multi-cell optimization problem into distributed single-cell sub-problems. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme not only guarantees the cell-edge UEs' quality of service (QoS) but also improves the overall system performance significantly. Moreover, this scheme can adapt to the load variations in a certain cell or across cells.