Wireless Scheduling with Dominant Interferers and Applications to Femtocellular Interference Cancellation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a belief propagation-based scheduling method for wireless networks with dominant interferers, providing globally optimal solutions for interference management and demonstrating significant rate improvements in femtocellular systems.

Contribution

It presents a novel, computationally efficient scheduling algorithm with provable global optimality for interference scenarios with dominant interferers, applicable to various interference coordination problems.

Findings

Significant rate improvements over reuse 1 without interference cancellation.

Loopy belief propagation achieves near-optimal performance in one or two iterations.

Method applies to subband scheduling, orthogonalization, and beamforming with dominant interferers.

Abstract

We consider a general class of wireless scheduling and resource allocation problems where the received rate in each link is determined by the actions of the transmitter in that link along with a single dominant interferer. Such scenarios arise in a range of scenarios, particularly in emerging femto- and picocellular networks with strong, localized interference. For these networks, a utility maximizing scheduler based on loopy belief propagation is presented that enables computationally-efficient local processing and low communication overhead. Our main theoretical result shows that the fixed points of the method are provably globally optimal for arbitrary (potentially non-convex) rate and utility functions. The methodology thus provides globally optimal solutions to a large class of inter-cellular interference coordination problems including subband scheduling, dynamic orthogonalization and beamforming whenever the dominant interferer assumption is valid. The paper focuses on applications for systems with interference cancellation (IC) and suggests a new scheme on optimal rate control, as opposed to traditional power control. Simulations are presented in industry standard femtocellular network models demonstrate significant improvements in rates over simple reuse 1 without IC, and near optimal performance of loopy belief propagation for rate selection in only one or two iterations.