A Layered Architecture for Fair Resource Allocation in Multicellular Multicarrier Systems

We consider a multicell multicarrier system with frequency reuse distance that is equal to one. Allowing all cells to transmit on the whole bandwidth unveils large potential gains in terms of spectral efficiency, in comparison with conventional cellular systems. Such a scenario, however, is often deemed unfeasible because of the strong multiple access interference (MAI) that negatively affects system performance. This paper presents a layered architecture that integrates a packet scheduler with an adaptive resource allocator that was explicitly designed to take care of the MAI. Each cell performs its resource management in a distributed way with no central controller. Iterative resource allocation assigns radio channels to the users to minimize interference. Packet scheduling guarantees that all users get a fair share of resources, regardless of their position in the cell. This scheduler-allocator architecture integrates both goals and is able to self-adapt to any traffic and user configuration. An adaptive distributed load control strategy can reduce the cell load so that the iterative procedure always converges to a stable allocation, regardless of the interference. Numerical results show that the proposed architecture guarantees both high spectral efficiency and throughput fairness among flows.