Improving base station coordination based packet scheduling schemes in fixed broadband wireless access networks

In this paper, we present a novel transmission scheduling scheme for fixed broadband wireless access (FBWA) networks. In order to mitigate high co-channel interference resulting from dense reuse of frequency, scheduling schemes often consider interference management issues as an essential part. To that end, a series of literature has been published recently, where a group of base stations form an interference group, and scheduling scheme deployed in the group allows only one base station to transmit at a time. As a result of time orthogonality in transmissions, the co-channel interference and hence the packet error rate can be reduced. However, prohibiting concurrent transmissions in these orthogonal schemes introduces higher end-to-end packet delay which might not be desirable for real-time traffic such as voice and video. Our proposed scheme aims to improve delay performance as well as to ensure better resource utilization in such schemes in several ways, most notably by introducing opportunistic non-orthogonality in transmissions, incorporating channel state based scheduling decisions, and employing adaptive modulation and coding.