A Self-Organized Resource Allocation using Inter-Cell Interference Coordination (ICIC) in Relay-Assisted Cellular Networks

TL;DR

This paper proposes a self-organized, dynamic resource allocation scheme for relay-assisted cellular networks that improves edge user performance by coordinating inter-cell interference, outperforming existing static schemes in simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel self-organized, dynamic ICIC scheme for RACN that balances spectral efficiency and edge user performance using local interactions.

Findings

Proposed scheme outperforms existing static resource allocation schemes.

Dynamic self-organized plan improves edge user SINR and spectral efficiency.

Introduction of interfering neighbor set concept for local ICIC coordination.

Abstract

In a multi-cell scenario, the inter-cell interference (ICI) is detrimental in achieving the intended system performance, in particular for the edge users. There is paucity of work available in literature on ICI coordination (ICIC) for relay-assisted cellular networks (RACN). In this paper, we do a survey on the ICIC schemes in cellular networks and RACN. We then propose a self-organized resource allocation plan for RACN to improve the edge user's performance by ICIC. We compare the performance of reuse-1, reuse-3, soft frequency reuse (SFR) scheme, proposed plan with and without relays. The performance metrics for comparison are edge user's spectral efficiency, their signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio (SINR) and system's area spectral efficiency. We show by the simulation results that our proposed plan performs better than the existing resource allocation schemes in static allocation scenario. Next, we propose to make our resource allocation plan dynamic and self-organized. The distinct features of our proposed plan are: One, it achieves a trade-off between the system's area spectral efficiency and the edge user's spectral efficiency performance. Secondly, it introduces a novel concept of interfering neighbor set to achieve ICIC by local interaction between the entities.