A self-organized metaheuristic approach towards inter-cell interference management for LTE-Advanced

Abstract

In order to meet the high throughput demand set by international mobile telecommunication union, carrier aggregation is exploited for expanding the bandwidth of up to 100 MHz in Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A). For achieving the aforementioned bandwidth, a maximum of five component carriers (CCs) can be aggregated as per Release 10 LTE-A. Improper CC selection and scheduling will result in hazardous throughput, fairness, and interference problems. Therefore, a proper CC selection and scheduling algorithm is most important for the overall performance of the network. On the other hand, due to an increased information exchange, centralized network planning is not a suitable choice here. In this study, we are employing a self-organized particle swarm optimization (PSO)-based joint component carrier selection and scheduling (JCCS) algorithm for the downlink. More precisely, the concern of the proposed algorithm is the autonomous distribution of resource blocks (RBs) from the pool of CCs by the base station, with the concern of minimizing the impact of inter-cell interference. Our proposed PSO-based JCCS algorithm results in the maximization of the min-max throughput by managing the inter-cell interference in an appropriate manner. Moreover, the proposed algorithm is compared with the traditional CC selection and scheduling algorithms, i.e., random, round robin, and proportional fair. The comparison is carried out in terms of throughput and fairness, and the calculated percentage gain in the end elaborates the performance improvement by exploiting PSO-based JCCS.