A Distributed eICIC Algorithm for Joint Inter-cell Interference Management and User Attachment in LTE-A HetNets

In Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) heterogeneous networks (HetNets), it is crucial to address the intercell interference and the user attachment problems in order to obtain good network performance. Moreover, the two problems are coupled and therefore must be tackled together. Based on potential game formulation, we jointly optimize almost blank subframe (ABS) and cell selection bias (CSB) settings for both marco base stations (BSs) and pico BSs in a distributed manner, where ABS is used to reduce inter-cell interference and CSB is used to obtain a more favorable user attachment pattern. We also use a cake-cutting algorithm as a downlink scheduler and compare it to other conventional downlink schedulers. Simulation studies confirm that joint ABS and CSB optimizations using the cake-cutting downlink scheduler can lead to large improvement in user fairness, spectral efficiency (SE), and energy efficiency (EE). Besides, the cake-cutting downlink scheduler runs much faster than its conventional convex-solver based downlink schedulers.