Inter-cell coordination in wireless data networks

Over the past few years, the design and performance of channel-aware scheduling strategies have attracted huge interest. In the present paper, we examine a somewhat different notion of scheduling, namely coordination of transmissions among base stations, which has received little attention so far. The inter-cell coordination comprises two key elements: (i) interference avoidance and (ii) load balancing. The interference avoidance involves coordinating the activity phases of interfering base stations so as to increase transmission rates. The load balancing aims at diverting traffic from heavily loaded cells to lightly loaded cells. Numerical experiments demonstrate that inter-cell scheduling may provide significant capacity gains.