Throughput-optimal resource allocation in LTE-Advanced with distributed antennas

Distributed antennas are envisaged for LTE-Advanced deployments in order to improve the coverage and increase the cell throughput. The latter in turn depends on how resources are allocated to the User Equipments (UEs) at the MAC layer. In this paper we discuss how to allocate resources to UEs so as to maximize the cell throughput, given that UEs may receive from several antennas simultaneously. We first show that the problem is both NP-hard and APX-hard, i.e. no polynomial-time algorithm exists that approximates the optimum within a constant factor. Hence, we propose and evaluate two polynomial-time heuristics whose complexity is feasible for practical purposes. Our simulative analysis shows that, in practical scenarios, the two heuristics are highly accurate. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.