Fair Stochastic Interference Orchestration with Cellular Throughput Boosted via Outband Sidelinks

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel approach combining ABS with outband sidelinks for D2D communications, which simplifies interference coordination and significantly improves fairness and throughput in dense cellular networks.

Contribution

It introduces a stochastic ABS decision framework leveraging outband sidelinks, enhancing fairness and reducing complexity in interference management.

Findings

Stochastic ABS with sidelinks improves fairness substantially.

The approach maintains high throughput with relay-enabled mmWave sidelinks.

Convex optimization guarantees proportional fairness in interference coordination.

Abstract

Time-domain Inter-Cell Interference Coordination (ICIC) is recognized as the main driver towards efficient and effective ultra-dense network deployments. Almost Blank Subframe (ABS), as key-example of ICIC, has been recently standardized so as to achieve high spectral efficiency. As we show in this article, adopting ABS implies non-trivial complexity to be effective in multicellular environments with heterogeneous cell coverage and user density. Nonetheless, no fairness determinism is guaranteed by ICIC and ABS in particular. Instead, we analytically show that a compound exploitation of ABS with outband sidelinks used for Device-to-Device (D2D) communications on unlicensed bands not only allows to abate the complexity of operating ABS, but also results in unexpectedly high levels of fairness. Based on the analysis, we formulate a convex optimization problem to stochastically make ABS decisions while providing proportional fairness guarantees. Our results prove that, compared to a legacy system, stochastically orchestration of ABS largely boosts fairness while retaining a notable throughput gain offered by mmWave outband sidelinks used for relay.