Practical large-scale coordinated scheduling in LTE-Advanced networks

In LTE-Advanced, the same spectrum can be re-used in neighboring cells, hence coordinated scheduling is employed to improve the overall network performance (cell throughput, fairness, and energy efficiency) by reducing inter-cell interference. In this paper, we advocate that large-scale coordination can be obtained through a layered solution: a cluster of few (i.e., three) cells is coordinated at the first level, and clusters of coordinated cells are then coordinated at a larger scale (e.g., tens of cells). We model both small-scale coordination and large-scale coordination as optimization problems, show that solving them at optimality is prohibitive, and propose two efficient heuristics that achieve good results, and yet are simple enough to be run at every Transmission Time Interval (TTI). Detailed packet-level simulations show that our layered approach outperforms the existing ones, both static and dynamic.