Centralized coordinated scheduling in LTE-Advanced networks

This work addresses the problem associated with coordinating scheduling decisions among multiple base stations in an LTE-Advanced downlink network in order to manage inter-cell interference with a centralized controller. To solve the coordinated scheduling problem, an integer non-linear program is formulated that, unlike most existing approaches, does not rely on exact channel state information but only makes use of the specific measurement reports defined in the 3GPP standard. An equivalent integer linear reformulation of the coordinated scheduling problem is proposed, which can be efficiently solved by commercial solvers. Extensive simulations of medium to large-size networks are carried out to analyze the performance of the proposed coordinated scheduling approaches, confirming available analytical results reporting fundamental limitations in the cooperation due to out-of-cluster interference. Nevertheless, the schemes proposed in this paper show important gains in average user throughput of the cell-edge users, especially in the case of heterogeneous networks.