WLC15-5: QoS Provisioning in the Absence of ARQ in Cellular Fixed Relay Networks through Inter-Cell Coordination

We propose an interference management scheme for providing quality of service (QoS) in the absence of automatic repeat request (ARQ) in cellular networks augmented with fixed relays. The high packet error rate in a system with ARQ not only incurs additional packet delay, which is undesirable for real-time services, but also reduces link throughput because of the increased over-the-air signaling overhead and retransmissions. The proposed scheme strives for improvements in packet error rate and net throughput while maintaining acceptable delay through the use of inter-cell coordination. The inter-cell coordination uses backbone network for information exchange and thereby transfers over-the-air signaling overhead to the high-speed backbone network. In our scheme, a group of base stations, each of which is either a recipient of or a contributor to dominant interference, form an interferer group and exchange channel state information with each other. Based on this instantaneous channel quality information, the proposed scheme makes intelligent scheduling and routing decisions taking the interference into account. The performance of the scheme is compared with that of an uncoordinated scheme through extensive simulations. It has been observed that the proposed scheme achieves significant performance benefits in terms of packet error rate and net throughput.