Performance of Decentralized Interference Coordination in the LTE Uplink

Interference management techniques like inter-cell interference coordination (ICIC) will play a key role in enabling high spectral efficiency in future wireless OFDMA-based cellular systems. The aim of ICIC is to lower inter-cell interference by coordinating the usage of spectrum resources among neighboring cells. Especially for the cell-edge users, avoiding the reuse of the same resources in neighboring cells yields a significant increase in SINR and thus capacity. In this paper, we consider decentralized ICIC schemes for the uplink of an LTE system in which base stations perform selfish resource allocation decisions. System level simulations in a multi-cell scenario show the convergence of the distributed schemes towards Nash equilibria. The mean cell throughput as well as the 5% CDF user throughput are compared to those achieved by frequency reuse 1 and 3 deployments. The simulation results show that the proposed schemes adapt well to varying uniform and especially non-uniform traffic loads.