Self-adaptive inter-cell interference coordination scheme for LTE systems

Self-adaptation is a key factor for the future evolution of mobile networks due to their increasing complexity and required management efforts. In this paper, we propose an autonomous self-adaptive scheme based on Harmony Search (HS) Algorithm for radio resource management and interference coordination. One of the main strong points of the proposed scheme is that the computations are independent on the number of users and cells in the network. This allows the proposed scheme to adapt to networks of any size and with an arbitrary number of users. The proposed scheme is based on the continuous “selfish” minimization of the violations to the user´s rate requirements. Each cell operates individually leading to the decomposition of the complex multi-cell allocation problem into a set of distributed simpler single-cell optimization problems. No a-priori frequency planning and/or explicit inter-cell coordination is required. The scheme also achieves a level of altruism by restricting the use of channels satisfying certain rate criterion to allow other cells to utilize them without being affected by interference. Through extensive simulations, we demonstrate that the proposed scheme leads the network to self-adapt into efficient frequency reuse patterns that provides substantial performance improvements to edge users without penalizing other users. We also conducted sensitivity analysis that showed that the values of HS parameters have minimum effect on the scheme performance.