IISRA: Inter-cell interference separation-based resource allocation for VoLTE

Voice over LTE (VoLTE), adopted as a standard technology by 3GPP is confronted by a number of challenges due to different Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements as well as the Inter-Cell Interference (ICI) problem. In this paper, a novel Resource Allocation (RA) strategy for improving VoIP capacity in LTE uplink system is proposed. Our strategy improves the VoLTE performance simply by prioritizing packets according to Signal to Generating Interference plus Noise Ratio (SGINR) based metric, and at the same time, allocating the ordered packets to Resource Blocks (RBs) in a predefined way, which protects vulnerable users with low uplink received signal strength (RSS) and separates threatening users in each cell into different RBs in an orthogonal manner. Through system level simulation, we demonstrate that our resource allocation scheme outperforms commonly-used frequency reuse-based schemes by increasing the VoIP capacity by up to 20%.