A Dynamic Resource Allocation Scheme for Inter-Cell Interference Coordination in Cellular OFDMA Systems

Abstract

This paper presents a novel dynamic subchannel allocation scheme that can improve the cell capacity by coordinating the intercell interference (ICI) in a cellular orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) system. The proposed scheme mitigates the ICI by adopting the virtual cell concept and improves the frequency reuse factor through subchannel reuse among different virtual cells. In particular, each virtual cell is assigned a primary and a secondary subchannel group, and each sector base station (BSs) allocates the subchannel resulting in the least ICI in probability out of the candidate subchannels to the mobile stations, dynamically searching from its primary group and then secondary group. In addition, an optional use of pico-cell overlay at the intersection of the virtual cells is also proposed to enhance the fairness of the proposed scheme with the BS-MS distance. Through computer simulation, it is shown that the proposed scheme has the advantages of improved cell capacity and fairness compared to the conventional schemes.