Hierarchical Radio Resource Optimization for Heterogeneous Networks with Enhanced Inter-cell Interference Coordination (eICIC)

TL;DR

This paper introduces a hierarchical radio resource management scheme using almost blank resource blocks (ABRB) to mitigate interference in HetNets, combining long-term adaptive control with short-term user scheduling for improved performance.

Contribution

It proposes a novel two timescale optimization framework leveraging interference graph sparsity for efficient ABRB and user scheduling in HetNets.

Findings

Significant interference reduction with ABRB scheme.

Low-complexity, asymptotically optimal solution at high SNR.

Notable performance gains over baseline methods.

Abstract

Interference is a major performance bottleneck in Heterogeneous Network (HetNet) due to its multi-tier topological structure. We propose almost blank resource block (ABRB) for interference control in HetNet. When an ABRB is scheduled in a macro BS, a resource block (RB) with blank payload is transmitted and this eliminates the interference from this macro BS to the pico BSs. We study a two timescale hierarchical radio resource management (RRM) scheme for HetNet with dynamic ABRB control. The long term controls, such as dynamic ABRB, are adaptive to the large scale fading at a RRM server for co-Tier and cross-Tier interference control. The short term control (user scheduling) is adaptive to the local channel state information within each BS to exploit the multi-user diversity. The two timescale optimization problem is challenging due to the exponentially large solution space. We exploit the sparsity in the interference graph of the HetNet topology and derive structural properties for the optimal ABRB control. Based on that, we propose a two timescale alternative optimization solution for the user scheduling and ABRB control. The solution has low complexity and is asymptotically optimal at high SNR. Simulations show that the proposed solution has significant gain over various baselines.