Joint load balancing, scheduling, and interference mitigation in multi-cell and multi-carrier wireless data systems

We consider the problem of maximizing the weighted sum data rate in multi-cell and multi-carrier wireless data systems in the presence of interference. We present a scheme that jointly considers load balancing, user scheduling, and interference mitigation to improve the system performance. Our proposed scheme iteratively applies two processes. The first process solves the sub-problem of load balancing and user scheduling while fixing the power allocation of each BS (and thus fixing the interference). We prove that this sub-problem is NP-hard, and devise a 1/2-approximation algorithm to solve the problem. We also consider an extended model capturing finite queue size and propose a 1/2-approximation algorithm under this model. The second process solves the problem of interference mitigation assuming fixed load balancing and user scheduling. We develop a local-improvement based algorithm to solve this problem. Via simulations, we demonstrate that our joint scheme improves both average system throughput and fairness significantly. Compared to the scheme with fixed user-BS association and 1/3 frequency reuse, the lowest 10% cell-edge users obtain more than 60% performance improvement and 90%of users enjoy more than 30%throughput improvement.