Joint inter-cell interference coordination and forced cooperative scheduling for the downlink of LTE systems

Increasing the cell edge user throughput in the Long Term Evolution (LTE) systems is a relatively new arising research area. The requirement for higher data rates especially at cell edges is becoming ever more pressing as the advantages could help satisfy better Quality of Service (QoS) on an enduser level and mean higher profitability on the operator side. Therefore developing algorithms and techniques to mitigate the inherently increased inter-cell interference (ICI) and reduced signal to interference and noise ratio (SINR) in the cell edge is a challenge with high potential benefits and rewards. To serve the above objective, we study the downlink (DL) packet scheduling and resource allocation of an LTE system under proportional fairness (PF) with an innovated utility function and a frequency reuse factor of one. We present our joint ICI-avoiding cooperative packet scheduling algorithm and show through simulations, cell edge throughput improvements of about 40% as an exchange for a 16% decrease in cooperating cells´ throughput in comparison to the results obtained under no cooperation between the evolved Node Bs (eNB).