Dynamic fair scheduling for inter-cell interference coordination in 4G cellular networks

Fairness is always an important issue for scheduling in communication systems. In 4G cellular networks, due to the fact that interference strengths from different user equipments (UEs) of neighbouring cells could be largely different, inter-cell interference coordination (ICIC) is quite difficult. In this paper, we model the ICIC problem in a scenario with two adjacent cells as a multi-decision 2-dimensional assignment problem, and we propose a dynamic fair scheduling scheme for it. The idea is to pair the strong interferers of adjacent cells with different UEs of the present cell alternatively, so that the damage of strong interferers can be dispersed by multiple UEs, which achieves high fairness. In details, we divide the time axis into periods for period-by-period decisions on assignment strategies. For each period, we combine the utilities of UEs in previous periods with the utility matrix for deciding the assignment strategy in the current period. Hungarian algorithm is used to obtain Max-Min fairness in each period, while the series of strategies form a greedy-like manner in which each assignment ameliorates the worst UEs up to this period. According to our simulations, the proposed scheme achieves extremely high fairness compared with random scheduling and traditional 1-shot Max-Min fair scheduling.