BASICS: Scheduling base stations to mitigate interferences in cellular networks

The increasing demand for higher data rates in cellular network results in increasing network density. As a consequence, inter-cell interference is becoming the most serious obstacle towards spectral efficiency. Therefore, considering that radio resources are limited and expensive, new techniques are required for efficient radio resource allocation in next generation cellular networks. In this paper, we propose a pure frequency reuse 1 scheme based on base station scheduling rather than the commonly adopted user scheduling. In particular, we formulate a base station scheduling problem to determine which base stations can be scheduled to simultaneously transmit, without causing excessive interference to any user of any of the scheduled base stations. We show that finding the optimal base station scheduling is NP-hard, and formulate the BASICS (BAse Station Inter-Cell Scheduling) algorithm, a novel heuristic to approximate the optimal solution at low complexity cost. The proposed algorithm is in line with the ABSF (almost blank sub-frame) technique recently standardized at the 3GPP. By means of numerical and packet-level simulations, we prove the effectiveness and superiority of BASICS as compared to the state of the art of inter-cell interference mitigation schemes.