Optimal and Distributed Scheduling for Multicell Capacity Maximization

We address the problem of multicell co-channel scheduling in view of mitigating interference in a wireless data network with full spectrum reuse. The centralized joint multicell scheduling optimization problem, based on the complete co-channel gain information, has so far been justly considered impractical due to complexity and real-time cell-to-cell signaling overhead. However, we expose here the following remarkable result for a large network with a standard power control policy. The capacity maximizing joint multicell scheduling problem admits a simple and fully distributed solution. This result is proved analytically for an idealized network. From the constructive proof, we propose a practical algorithm that is shown to achieve near maximum capacity for realistic cases of simulated networks of even small sizes.