A distributed radio resource allocation algorithm with interference coordination for multi-cell OFDMA systems

Inter-cell interference is a major problem in multi-cell OFDMA systems and can severely degrade the system throughput, particularly for cell-edge users. An efficient technique to mitigate inter-cell interference (ICI), is interference coordination that allocates certain resources among users in different cells. In this paper, we propose a novel and distributed algorithm in order to mitigate the inter-cell interference and enhance the capacity of the users near the cell-edge area of a multi-cellular network configuration. The main characteristics of the algorithm are the bandwidth allocation in a user selective manner and the collision avoidance with subchannels in use by users in neighboring cells. The algorithm requires coordination between base stations (BSs) in the sense that the cell-edge bands in adjacent cells should be orthogonal and channel occupancy state of each cell must be known to its neighboring cells. It is shown that the proposed algorithm has better performance than existing conventional schemes. Thus, our algorithm can be applied in next generation cellular systems 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) and IEEE 802.16m.