Interference alignment based coordinated scheduling for uplink small cell enhancement

Interference has been an important performance limiting problem for wireless networks, especially for LTE networks where frequency reuse factor is 1. Interference alignment is a promising method to mitigate interference and achieve larger degrees of freedom. With only one single antenna equipped at UE, an uplink interference alignment exploiting degrees of freedom on frequency domain was introduced. Two straightforward scheduling strategies, PF and minimum interference scheduling, were proposed and analyzed. Based on the analysis, an interference alignment based coordinated scheduling (IACS) was proposed to combine the benefits of PF scheduling and minimum interference scheduling. Simulation results verified the analysis, and showed that IACS could achieve better performance for high interference scenarios.