A low complexity resource scheduler for cooperative cellular networks

Multi-cell cooperative transmission schemes are considered as promising candidates in future 4G wireless networks (LTE-Advanced) to combat the inter-cell interference that degrades the cell-edge throughput performance. An efficient proportional fair (PF) scheduling algorithm for Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) based cooperative cellular networks is proposed. A PF metric maximization problem is first formulated. Then a two-step algorithm is proposed to solve the problem: the user grouping step and the user scheduling step. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme significantly increases the cell-edge throughput and guarantees system fairness.