Improving Resource Efficiency with Partial Resource Muting for Future Wireless Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel partial resource muting scheme for wireless networks that improves resource efficiency by balancing reuse and interference, applicable to 4G and 5G systems.

Contribution

It presents a new framework analyzing resource allocation properties and proposes a partial muting scheme to enhance efficiency in interference-limited regimes.

Findings

Significant performance gains over full frequency reuse.

Effective in both 4G and 5G networks.

Identifies transition point between noise-limited and interference-limited regimes.

Abstract

We propose novel resource allocation algorithms that have the objective of finding a good tradeoff between resource reuse and interference avoidance in wireless networks. To this end, we first study properties of functions that relate the resource budget available to network elements to the optimal utility and to the optimal resource efficiency obtained by solving max-min utility optimization problems. From the asymptotic behavior of these functions, we obtain a transition point that indicates whether a network is operating in an efficient noise-limited regime or in an inefficient interference-limited regime for a given resource budget. For networks operating in the inefficient regime, we propose a novel partial resource muting scheme to improve the efficiency of the resource utilization. The framework is very general. It can be applied not only to the downlink of 4G networks, but also to 5G networks equipped with flexible duplex mechanisms. Numerical results show significant performance gains of the proposed scheme compared to the solution to the max-min utility optimization problem with full frequency reuse.