Multi-cell cooperative scheduling for uplink SC-FDMA systems

In LTE uplink systems, single-carrier frequency-division multiple access (SC-FDMA) has been employed. In SC-FDMA, orthogonal frequency resources are assigned to different users to avoid intra-cell interference. However, inter-cell interference (ICI) caused by the users in neighboring cells significantly deteriorates the performance. Cooperation among base stations must be used to deal with ICI for multi-cell systems. In this paper, we investigate multi-cell scheduling in SC-FDMA for LTE uplink. We propose a novel cooperative scheduling algorithm that takes inter-cluster and intra-cluster interference into account. We first perform coordinated scheduling and then link adaptation to select modulation and coding scheme (MCS). Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm has significant gains over the single-cell proportional fair (PF) scheduling algorithm on both cell-edge and average throughput. It also outperforms the existing cooperative algorithm under full pathloss compensation and fractional open-loop power control (OLPC).