Distributed Energy-Efficient Inter-Cell Interference Coordination (ICIC) in Multi-Cell HetNets

We present a distributed energy-efficient Inter-Cell Interference Coordination (ICIC) scheme for multi- cell HetNets (Heterogeneous Networks) in the downlink. This novel scheme aims to maximize the user fairness performance of the overall system as well as minimizing the total average transmit power at the base station side. We consider a realistic power model to characterize the power consumed (including circuit and transmitted power) at the base station side. We define an energy efficient performance metric in bits/Joule and the user fairness as the 5th percentile of the average user throughput. The proposed scheme is divided into the following three stages: dominant interferences classification, inter-cell radio resource allocation and intra-cell power control. The inter-cell radio resource allocation is formulated as a multidimensional knapsack problem. In order to satisfy the complexity requirements associated with multi-cell networks, we simplify, relax and decompose the original problem into a main master problem and multiple sub-problems. Our simulation results show the proposed scheme significantly increases both the user fairness and the energy efficiency (EE) of the overall network.