On the Impact of Uplink Scheduling on Intercell Interference Variation in MIMO OFDM Systems

Recently, several works have pointed out the negative impact of intercell interference variation on the performance of link adaptation in multi-cell single input single output (SISO) systems. However, the performance of adaptive precoder selection in multiple input multiple output (MIMO) cellular networks in the presence of interference variation is much less understood. In this paper we develop a simulation model for MIMO orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) networks that allows us to study the impact of popular scheduling and power control algorithms on the time variation of the uplink interference power. We find that employing a time persistent proportional fair scheduler (which we term proportional fair in frequency, PFF, scheduler) together with an open loop power control scheme significantly reduces intercell interference variation and thereby it provides higher throughput than traditional schedulers that are primarily optimized for a single cell setting without taking into account the variation of the intercell interference power.