Cooperative Interference Control for Spectrum Sharing in OFDMA Cellular Systems

Abstract: This paper studies cooperative schemes for the inter-cell interference control in orthogonal-frequency-divisionmultiple- access (OFDMA) cellular systems. The downlink transmission in a simplified two-cell system is examined, where both cells simultaneously access the same frequency band using OFDMA. The joint power and subcarrier allocation over the two cells is investigated for maximizing their sum throughput with both centralized and decentralized implementations. Particularly, the decentralized allocation is achieved via a new cooperative interference control approach, whereby the two cells independently implement resource allocation to maximize individual throughput in an iterative manner, subject to a set of mutual interference power constraints. Simulation results show that the proposed decentralized resource allocation schemes achieve the system throughput close to that by the centralized scheme, and provide substantial throughput gains over existing schemes.