Dynamic radio coordination for improved quality of experience in software-defined wireless networks

Co-channel interference (CCI) is one of the major hindering factors of wireless system capacity and quality of experience (QoE) to users. Radio coordination (RC) techniques have been investigated to control CCI. Clustering, as a bootstrapping step of RC, defines which subset of radio nodes should be coordinated together. As a typical RC technique, cluster-based power control is not well studied in the literature. Existing solutions include all radio nodes in a single cluster, or they rely on pre-defined fixed clusters. In this tutorial we put forward dynamic clustering for coordinated power control, in the context of software-defined radio access networks, and hope to trigger more follow-up research on the topic. We propose to form clusters according to the dominant interference relation among radio nodes. A comparative simulation study indicates that the proposed approach offers similar QoE to users as the benchmark algorithms used, yet with greatly reduced RC complexity.