A novel distributed inter-cell interference coordination scheme based on projected subgradient and network flow optimization

In this paper, we propose a novel distributed inter-cell interference coordination (ICIC) scheme. The proposed scheme, which runs in polynomial time, finds a near-optimum dynamic resource partitioning that maximizes a proportional-fairness criterion in the entire network. The proposed scheme is based on primal-decomposition method, where the problem is divided into a master and multiple sub-problems. The master-problem is solved using projected-subgradient method while each of the sub-problems is solved using minimum-cost network flow optimization. Through extensive simulations of four IMT-advanced scenarios, we quantify the gains achieved using the proposed scheme. We demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves both high cell-edge throughput, that is comparable to frequency reuse 3, and high aggregate throughput, that is at least as good as the aggregate throughput achieved by frequency reuse 1.