A Game-Theoretic Approach to Decentralized Interference-Avoidance Scheduling for Cellular Systems: Algorithm and Equilibria

Dense frequency reuse makes the intercell interference control a crucial issue in cellular systems. Due to large signalling overhead, multicell processing and resource scheduling are not practicable solutions, at least today. We propose a decentralized transmission scheduling scheme where each base station exploits the knowledge of the intercell interference to locally allocate the resources. The idea is inspired by cognitive radio system where each (secondary) user accesses the spectrum according to the level of interference and thus it schedules the transmission over interference-free frequency intervals. Similarly, here each base station schedules the access to time or frequency resource so as to mitigate the generated interference and maximize its goodput. In this decentralized approach, the intercell signalling is replaced by the level of interference estimated locally and independently within each cell. Equilibria are analyzed using game theory with each scheduler acting as a player that locally maximizes its objective (goodput) while interacting (or interfering) with others.