Energy efficient coordinated radio resource management: A two player sequential game modelling for the long-term evolution downlink

Inter-cell interference (ICI) is a key limiting factor to the radio frequency (RF) energy performance of a multi-cell multi-user radio access network (RAN). The channel quality of the cell edge users is greatly impaired by ICI owing to the fact that cell edge users are furthest away from their serving base stations (BSs) and closest to the interfering BSs. Consequently the BS is compelled to allocate more physical resource blocks [PRBs (In LTE a PRB spans 12 sub-carriers each with a bandwidth of 15 kHz over a 0.5 ms time slot)] to the cell edge users in order to meet their quality-of-service (QoS) targets. The study proposes a novel ICI management technique that mitigates the effects of ICI through a sequential game play between cells in the E-UTRAN [Evolved Universal Mobile Telecommunications Systems (UMTS) terrestrial radio access network] based on the instantaneous cell offered load. The proposed technique is shown to produce greater user channel quality improvements of 4 dB greater than the state-of-the-art ICI management techniques. The channel quality improvements result in a utilisation of less PRBs, RF and radio head energy which translate to energy reduction gains of 34 and 45 at low- and high-offered loads, respectively. In addition the proposed scheme does not require a central processing entity such as a radio network controller and can be implemented in unplanned self-organising networks.