Multi-cell Cooperative Scheduling and Power Control in SC-FDMA Systems

Inter-cell interference is a major factor that limits the performance of multi-cell systems. In this paper, a cooperative scheduling and power control algorithm for Single-Carrier Frequency-Division Multiple Access (SC-FDMA) multi-cell systems is proposed to deal with the inter-cell interference in Long Term Evolution (LTE) uplink. It performs scheduling and power control for each cell separately, which schedules users first and then configures the transmit power for each user. The proposed algorithm performs scheduling by first estimating the inter-cell interference and then assigning resources to users. When optimizing the users transmit power, the performance variation of both the objective cell and other interfering cells is considered. Furthermore, a power control algorithm with low-complexity is proposed, which only considers the performance change of several cells interfered most by the objective cell and estimates the performance change of all other cells by introducing a compensation factor, when optimizing the transmit power of each user. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in cell average and cell edge throughput.