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Downlink Coordinated Radio Resource Management in Cellular Networks With Partial CSI
Eduard Calvo, Olga Muoz, Member, IEEE, Josep Vidal, Member, IEEE, and Adrin Agustn, Member, IEEE
AbstractWe explore decentralized coordination of sectored cellular networks to adapt the usage of downlink resources to the instantaneous network conditions. The transmission frame consists of an orthogonal bandwidth usage phase, where sectors perform FDMA and power control over an agreed frequency chunk, and a shared bandwidth usage phase where each sector performs FDMA over the full available bandwidth without power control (interference is not controlled in this phase by any means). Decentralized network utility maximization with global optimality guarantee is enabled by xing this structure of the transmission frame, which does not cause signicant network-wide losses. Thus, the ability to better balance the resources gained from coordination generates some slack that can be used to either i) provide higher-quality access, ii) increase the number of active users, or iii) reduce deployment and maintenance costs by operating larger cells. Index TermsCoordinated interference mitigation, distributed algorithms, multicell resource allocation, network utility maximization.

I. INTRODUCTION

REQUENCY planning in sectored cellular networks has traditionally relied on xed frequency reuse patterns to balance the desire of high spectral efciencies and the need for intersector interference mitigation. This way, intersector frequency usage is decoupled and designed to match some average situation in terms of per-sector trafc load, user geometry, and quality of service requirements, but the network is unable to react to instantaneous imbalances. Pursuing better efciencies, we explore decentralized coordination mechanisms of (a cluster of) neighboring sectors to dynamically adapt the usage of downlink resources to the instantaneous network conditions. That is, a number of sectored base stations (BSs) are deployed to supply wireless coverage to a number of mobile stations (MSs) where, for the sake of operational amenability, we assume the following.
Manuscript received August 26, 2010; revised March 23, 2011 and July 26, 2011; accepted November 08, 2011. Date of publication December 22, 2011; date of current version February 10, 2012. This work has been done in the framework of the FP7 project ICT-248891 STP FREEDOM, funded by the European Community, and by the Spanish Science and Technology Commissions and EC FEDER funds through projects: TEC2006-06481/TCM, TEC2010-19171/TCM MOSAIC and CONSOLIDER INGENIO CSD2008-00010 COMONSENS. E. Calvo is with the Department of Production, Technology, and Operations Management, IESE Business School, University of Navarra, Barcelona 08034, Spain (e-mail: ecalvo@iese.edu). O. Muoz, J. Vidal, and A. Agustn are with the Department of Signal Theory and Communications, Technical University of Catalonia (UPC), Barcelona 08034, Spain (e-mail: olga.munoz@upc.edu; josep.vidal@upc.edu; adrian.agustin@upc.edu). Color versions of one or more of the gures in this paper are available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. Digital Object Identier 10.1109/TSP.2011.2177971

There exists a dedicated backhaul connecting the BSs. Orthogonal-frequency-domain multiple access (OFDMA) is adopted for its better achievable rates and data latency than time-domain multiple access (TDMA), and also because it allows for ner granularity in resource allocation [1]. The MSs have interference measurement capabilities but do not have any interference cancellation or multiuser detection skill. Each links path loss is the only available channel state information (CSI). As it varies slowly, the path loss need not be frequently updated. This helps keep the feedback load and the BS processing burden under control, as opposed to the situation where each per-tone fading state is available [2]. Each BS and MS has an arbitrary number of antennas, de(antennas per sector) and , respectively, noted by such that performance gains from MIMO (without other CSI than path loss) [3][5] can be captured. When sectors coordinate, the reuse factor becomes an implicit outcome of the resource allocation algorithm. That is, ideally, clustered allocation would optimize i) the frequency bands assigned to each sector BS and MS [as in fractional frequency reuse (FFR) [6]]; and ii) the power levels to be set in each frequency band [as in soft-frequency reuse (SFR) [7], [8]]. The essence of both approaches1 is to match the reuse of each frequency band to the particular trafc dynamics and user geometry. However, such an optimal coordination scheme has not yet been found because the associated optimization problems contain nonconvexities that have been rendered unavoidable so far. For this reason, the existing literature is based on the application of heuristics to simplied versions of the general coordination scheme. Some works consider that power levels and band sizes are given. In [6], sector center users are assigned to high-reuse resource blocks and sector edge users are assigned to low-reuse resource blocks. Interference avoidance is hence achieved by prioritizing access of sectors to low-reuse blocks. In [11], users are a priori classied and assigned different predetermined power levels accordingly (one level for cell-edge users and another one for cell-center users). The emphasis is on applying heuristics to maximize the achievable sum rate in a two-scale
1FFR and SFR are often used indistinctly (see [9]), since FFR can be seen as a particular case of SFR. In FFR, each frequency band is associated with a particular reuse factor (e.g., reuse 1 in one band and 1/3 in another) and a particular transmission power prole. In SFR, all frequency bands are used in all sectors and the reuse pattern arises from some nonuniform power allocation (e.g., most of the power assigned to a subset of bands and a small portion allocated to the rest [10]).

1053-587X/$26.00 2011 IEEE

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fashion: a long-term allocation that groups users according to their geometry, and a short-term allocation that assigns resources to user groups based on per-channel CSI. Maximizing the achievable sum rate is also the objective of [7], [8], but the focus is on studying the impact of the power mask shape while the channel gain (or SINR) per resource block and user is known. Another set of works optimize power levels assuming that band sizes are given. ON/OFF power control for achievable sum rate maximization is considered in [12], which is surprisingly shown to be optimal in the low SINR regime and to perform very close to optimal (continuous) power control in general. A similar setup is studied in [13], where sectors greedily compete for the minimization of the total interference received in the assigned subbands, but user geometry and link direction (uplink/ downlink) are disregarded, and the existence of a Nash equilibrium (NE) cannot be always proven. Continuous power optimization is considered for constant bit-rate (CBR) and best-effort (BE) users in [14] and [10], respectively, where selsh sectors iteratively rene user scheduling and power allocation decisions. The specic algorithms and results are, however, structurally different: for CBR users, the objective is power usage minimization and NEs exist but are not always unique; for BE users, the focus is on network utility maximization and convergence to an equilibrium allocation cannot be proved. In any case, even when the algorithms converge to a steady-state solution, there is no guarantee that it is a global optimum. Finally, some works optimize band sizes taking power levels as given. In [15], two zones are time-discriminated within one transmission frame: i) an orthogonal subphase where each sector performs FDMA over a previously agreed frequency chunk of equal size, and ii) a full reuse subphase where all the BSs are active in the whole bandwidth. Sector bandwidth allocation in the orthogonal subphase is further optimized for achievable sum rate maximization in [16]. In this paper, we use the frame structure of [16] and extend the optimization scope as follows. To accommodate users with different QoS requirements, network utility [17][20] is used instead of achievable sum rate, which is now maximized in a distributed fashion. The time duration of each subphase is optimized to match the instantaneous user spatial distribution within the cluster. However, as the time separation between the two subphases is global (i.e., shared by all the sectors under coordination), the cluster size cannot grow without bound to prevent very far apart users to inuence the resource allocation policy. Sector bandwidth, user bandwidth, and power allocations are optimized in the orthogonal subphase, resulting in a signicant improvement of the achievable rates. To help interference predictability, power allocation in the full reuse subphase is assumed uniform in the available bandwidth. The allocation strategies are generalized to an arbitrary number of antennas. Compared to other existing works in the literature, our approach has the following advantages:

Fig. 1. Network scenario with , and .

=2

=4

= 3 coordinated sectors where

=3

The same algorithm applies regardless of the nature of the underlying QoS requirements of the serving users. Global optimality can be achieved in polynomial time. Standard decomposition techniques can be used to decentralize optimization. Feedback load is comparably lower because fewer, slowlyvarying parameters are required. User classications such as sector center and sector edge are outcomes of optimization, and not heuristics. Intuitively, bad geometry users will be served in the orthogonal subphase, which is interference free; oppositely, most good geometry users will be found in the full reuse subphase, where the BSs operate at full power but optimize the bandwidth allocation. Despite the optimization of the duration of each subphase, good geometry users could still benet from soft reuse in the form of sector power control as they are typically low-interfered. We hence study the impact of ON/OFF and discrete power control during the full reuse subphase. However, none of them bring about signicant performance gains despite their larger computational complexity. Notation: Boldface lower-case letters denote column vecand standing for the all-zero and all-one tors, with column vectors of length , respectively. We denote by the th entry of vector , and use and for scalar and component-wise inequalities indistinctly. Boldface upper-case letters are used for matrices, with standing for the identity matrix and denoting the entry of the th row and th column of matrix , whose transpose and Hermitian are and , respectively. The th ordered eigenvalue (singular value) of an square (arbitrary) matrix is denoted by , . Whenever needed, the superscript where denotes the optimal value of a variable. II. SYSTEM MODEL AND PRELIMINARIES Fig. 1 shows the adopted network setup. The allocation of the network bandwidth is coordinated every transmission frame interval within a cluster of adjacent sectors. Each sector is managed by a BS that splits transmit power uniformly over bandwidth and across antennas, and that is power constrained to . At the beginning of the th frame, the path loss is solely ( characterized by the vectors ), where is the number of active MSs in sector

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B. Transmission Strategy We consider an OFDMA system where no CSI except for each link path loss is available at the transmit side. In such a situation, a practical strategy is to perform uniform power allocation among groups of tones sufciently far apart such that their individual fading states are uncorrelated and frequency diversity is enabled. This is the case in the IEEE 802.16e standard with partial usage of subchannels (PUSC) and full usage of subchannels (FUSC) channelization modes [21], where no frequency-selective scheduling is possible. With this approach, in the orthogonal and full reuse the rates achieved by and , are subphases [4, Sec. 5.4.5], denoted by upper bounded by the ergodic (or average) mutual information and , respectively [22]. By ergodic mutual inforterms mation we understand that averaging is performed with respect to the fading distribution in the frequency domain assuming a sufciently large number of independently fading carriers. For the sake of simplicity, we present the proposed approach , but the infor the SISO case only, where terested reader will nd in Appendix A the extension of all the deresults of the paper to the MIMO case. Thus, if notes the fading state at a given tone between the th sector BS and stands for its probability density funcand tion (pdf), the corresponding performance reference bounds are and shown in (1) and (2) at the bottom of the page, where denote signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and interference-to-noise ratio (INR), respectively. They are given by

Fig. 2. Transmission frame format.

refers to the th one in the sector, and stands for the path loss (including antenna pattern effects) between the th sector BS and . A. Frame Format Each frame has two subphases of adjustable time duration,2 as , shown in Fig. 2. The rst subphase, of duration is called the orthogonal subphase because each sector is allocated a disjoint (not necessarily equal) fraction of the total bandwidth. We characterize this allocation with the fractional vector , whose th component denotes that Hz during this subphase. Within each sector is assigned sector band, power and bandwidth are also allocated among the sector MSs. The fractional vectors (where and ) represent the per-MS bandwidth and power allocation at the th sector, respectively, indicating that transmission to consumes Watt and Hz. In essence, a two-tier FDMA applies in the orthogonal subphase: 1) the FDMA at sector level and 2) the FDMA at MS level in each sector. We refer to the second subphase as the full reuse subphase . Here, each sector transmits over the enof duration tire bandwidth , but the FDMA at the MS level still applies. Similarly, the fractional vector characterizes the MS bandwidth allocation at the th sector. For later convenience, we also dene normalized allocations with respect to the time devoted to each subphase, i.e., , and .
2The proposed optimization framework can be extended as well to the FDD mode, but it is beyond the scope of this paper.

(3) is a coefcient that includes transmit and receive where is the additive white antenna gains and the MS noise factor, Gaussian noise (AWGN) one-sided power spectral density, and is a penalizing gap accounting for imperfect (non-Gaussian, nite-blocklength) coding.3 can be graphically represented as the horizontal distance between the channel capacity versus SNR curve and the actual spectral efciency versus SNR point of operation [23], [24]. It is measured in decibels of SNR, and values observed for state-of-the-art systems range typical from 3 to 7 dB, where the lower end values are usually achieved when the coding scheme is powerful (e.g., turbo-coding, LDPC
3The gap can be further increased to model the impact of out-of-cluster interference on nal performance via degradation.

(1)

(2)

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coding) and the decoding algorithm performs close to maximum likelihood decoding. By using mutual information, the achievable rates (1)(2) are independent of the specic transmit/receive strategy. In contrast, some works focus on joint optimizations of allocation mechanisms and physical layer designs. In [25], power control and beamforming are designed with full CSI. Multiple sector BSs are allowed to transmit simultaneously to the same MS in [26], where the precoding scheme and power allocation are optimized jointly assuming local CSI (perfect or statistical) only. Similarly, local CSI is used in [27] to design interference-aware precoders using interference alignment techniques. C. Allocation Criteria Section II-B was devoted to quantify user performance on a per-frame (short-term) basis. At a system level, however, the rates (1)(2) should be allocated such that network resources are fairly shared in the long term and the QoS targets of each individual are satised. This can be effectively modeled using utility functions (example of QoS-oriented and best-effort utility functions can be found in [22]) that depend on the long-term denotes the utility throughput of each user. Thus , a concave function of its throughput as seen at the of . We use an beginning of the th transmission frame, exponentially weighted smoothing (4) and the per-frame to relate the long-term throughput achieved in the th frame, (short-term) rates represents the smoothing memory. Thus, where the throughput of a user that has not been scheduled for frames in a row decreases exponentially with a factor , which may trigger the scheduling of this user in the next frame due to rate starvation. Thus, the memory determines the horizon of the long-term fairness imposed in the system: the larger , the longer the fairness horizon. The initial value of the throughput, , is a design parameter that we will set equal to zero to evaluate how long does it take for a user to get from starvation to an acceptable utility level. as an aggregate At the sector level, we use sector utility indicator to represent the overall satisfaction of the sector MSs. It is a concave function of the user utilities, nondecreasing in each of its components. For instance, under a maxmin approach (5) ultimately denes how resources Finally, network utility are balanced among sectors, and is dened as a concave, nondecreasing function of the sector utilities. For example, under a maxsum criterion, (6) As sector utilities are also concave nondecreasing in user utilities, and these in turn are concave nondecreasing on user throughputs, it follows from the convexity properties of composite functions [28] that is a concave function of the user

throughputs. This is an important property since concavity of network utility with respect to throughputs will be needed later on for guaranteeing global optimality of allocation algorithms.4 Different works rely on different denitions of user and sector utilities. The scope of this paper, however, is not to advocate for one or another denition of utility, but to generalize allocation methods to include a wide range of performance criteria. III. SHORT-TERM PERFORMANCE CHARACTERIZATION Expressions (1)(2) characterize the achievable rates of a MS during one frame duration, but are not mathematically amenable. Pursuing the use of efcient methods for rate allocation in global optimization approaches, we use in the orthogonal subphase a parametric lower bound on the ergodic capacity of a SISO channel with arbitrary fading distribution from [22]. is Lemma 1 [22]: A lower bound to (7) where . Expression (7) was shown in [22, Fig. 2] to be extremely tight for Rayleigh fading. We shall therefore take the right-hand side of (7) as a reasonable conservative approximation of throughout the rest of the paper. On the other hand, the maximum achievable rate of the full , where reuse subphase was

(8)

is a constant that can be computed ofine not very frequently, as path loss varies slowly. However, in applications where saving memory or computational complexity is an important concern, one can use the closed-form lower bound derived in Appendix B for the MIMO case, which extends Lemma 1. Given the path loss at the beginning of the th frame, the short-term performance of a sector is given by the achievable rates that can be sustained in each subphase during one frame duration, denoted by (orthogonal subphase) and (full reuse subphase). Since the frame format couples these rates, we study the resulting achievable rate regions. A. The Orthogonal Subphase Assume that the duration of the orthogonal subphase is and that the bandwidth assigned to sector equals . Equivalently, the available normalized bandwidth during this subphase
convexity result also applies to the more general form U (t) = where fg : ! g are real-valued, concave, nondecreasing functions.
4This

g (U (t)),

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is . The resulting achievable rate region is hence given by the rate vectors satisfying

for some feasible normalized bandwidth allocation (16) Analogously, since (15)(16) are all linear inequalities, if the is added to a convex optimizaconstraint and are optimization variables, the tion problem where resulting problem is also convex. IV. DISTRIBUTED NETWORK UTILITY MAXIMIZATION The instantaneous achievable rate regions of Section III comprise the set of rate allocations that, given the path loss at time , can be implemented at each sector by varying the frame format. Since the frame format comprises both global and local variables, sector rate allocation policies cannot be unilaterally implemented and need to be coordinated instead.5 In our framework, coordination is not in the form of greedy competition but rather as the pursuit of a common social goal: the maximization of network utility. Following, we study how to achieve this goal with centralized and decentralized coordination mechanisms. A. Centralized Coordination When the network architecture permits, network utility can be maximized by a centralized unit. Upon collection of the path loss and throughputs of all the users, the central coordinator broadcasts the optimal resource allocation (frame format) to be used in the next transmission frame. It is the solution to the problem (17)

(9) for some feasible allocation described by (10) where (9) follows from (1) and Lemma 1. By using the norand in (9), the malized variables turns out to be more equivalent representation of amenable from an analysis standpoint. Needless to say, the previous variable change can be straightforwardly reversed to obtain the original allocation vectors. In terms of the new variables, such the achievable rate region contains the rate vectors that

(11) for some feasible normalized allocation satisfying (12) to deIn the sequel, we shall use note that a rate vector is feasible in the orthogonal subphase. complies with the conWhile this implicitly means that straints (11)(12), it will save us from repeatedly reproducing them, with this simplifying exposition. Notice that the nonlinear right hand side inequalities in (11) behave well since the nonlinear terms are jointly concave in thanks to the concavity of the function for . As the rest of inequalities in is added to a (11)(12) are all linear, if , and are opticonvex optimization problem where mization variables, the resulting problem is also convex. B. The Full Reuse Subphase Assume the duration of the full reuse subphase is Given (8), the resulting achievable rate region acterized by the rate vectors satisfying . is char-

(18) (19) (20) (21) The above optimization problem is convex because i) the objective (17) is linear, ii) user utilities (18) are concave, iii) rate feasibility constraints (19) are convex, and iv) constraints (20)(21) are linear. The optimal frame format can then be computed in worst case polynomial time. Notice that the allocated rates comply with the achievable rate regions , which are based on the ergodic (average) mutual information of the MSs links. Thus, outage events (i.e., allocating more rate than what the channel
5Remember that 2 , dened in Section II-A, stands for the allocation of sector normalized bandwidth in the orthogonal subphase. That is, the sth b = , the normalized bandwidth allocated to sector component of is w s during the orthogonal subphase.

(13) for some feasible bandwidth allocation described by (14) results in a A similar change of the form more convenient representation of . In terms of the normalized variables, the achievable rate region contains the rate vectors such that (15)

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(23)

(24) (25)
Fig. 3. Illustration of the two-level primal-dual decomposition approach.

supports instantaneously) are not precluded. However, outage probabilities can be made arbitrarily small by increasing the number of carriers of the system [22]. The optimization in (17)(21) is sequential. While user, sector, and network utility are dynamic variables that vary with time, we are approaching them on a frame-by-frame fashion only. Why we are not focusing on their limiting values ) is mainly due to two reasons. First, in practical (as scenarios such limiting values may not be dened because user geometry and channel conditions are also dynamic. Thus, forward optimization could only span the coherence time of the network, given in practice by the path loss refresh rate. Second, the complexity associated to doing this outweighs its potential benets: computational load is usually rendered prohibitive [22] and the design of distributed algorithms complicates. B. Distributed Coordination A number of reasons motivate nding distributed algorithms to solve (17)(21). Sometimes there is no centralized unit to coordinate the sectors. In other applications where scalability of the allocation policy is an issue, distributed coordination helps keeping the complexity under affordable levels when the number of user and/or sectors under coordination increases. Finally, if the focus is on reducing signalling overhead between BSs, distributed algorithms can be found that require exchanging only sparse optimization signalling instead of costly local information about path loss and throughputs. One way to decouple the problem (17)(21) is to apply a primal decomposition with respect to the variable and then a dual decomposition with respect to the coupling constraint . This primal-dual decomposition [20], [29] induces the two-level optimization algorithm shown in Fig. 3: At the lower level, sector bandwidth allocations and local allocations are coordinated for some given ; at the upper level, the optimal value of is searched. Convergence to the global optimum is guaranteed thanks to convexity of (17)(21). First, the master problem (MP) attempts to solve (17)(21) by searching the optimal value of : for each xed under test we solve the secondary master problem (SMP)

whose optimal value is denoted by . A ternary search is used to nd the value of that maximizes (see Algorithm 1). However, in practical applications where only a few values of can be implemented, it might result more appropriate to perform an exhaustive search over the set of feasible s. Algorithm 1: Master Problem: ternary search 1: Set 2: while 3: Dene , and tolerance do .

4: 5: 6: 7: 8: 9:

and solve the SMP (22)(25) using , and : optimal values , and . then . if elseif then . . else end if end while .

Second, to solve the SMP (22)(25) for each xed value of , we start by relaxing the constraint of (25), which coupled the local variables of each sector, to obtain

(26)

(27) (28) (29) is the Lagrange multiplier, or price of bandwidth, where of the relaxed constraint. Thus, the relaxed SMP can be decomposed into different sector subproblems (SS), (30)

(22)

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TABLE I PHYSICAL LAYER SETUP OF THE SIMULATED SCENARIO

(31) (32) (33) that use sector-wise information to optimize sector allocations for some given price of bandwidth , achieving an optimal value of . As strong duality holds [28], the SMP (22)(25) can be equivalently solved through its dual problem (34) Thanks to complementary slackness, the optimal is such that , where is the optimal sector bandwidth allocated by sector when the price is . This way, as sectors use more bandwidth when it is cheap, a bisection algorithm can be implemented to nd that only needs the SSs to obtained in each iteration. broadcast the value Algorithm 2: Secondary Master Problem: bisection , and tolerance . Set for do Solve the SS (30)(33) using . and collect . Broadcast end for do Set and go to Step 2. while end while . Update do Solve the SS (30)(33) using . for and collect . Broadcast end for then Set . if else Set end if if then go to Step 7. and all the sectors broadcast else . 16: end if 1: 2: 3: 4: 5: 6: 7: 8: 9: 10: 11: 12: 13: 14: 15: In each iteration of the SMP the sectors share until the price of bandwidth is determined to within a tolerance of and the achieved sector utility is broadcasted. Thus, solving one instance of the SMP requires broadcasting (35) and represent the number of bits used to bits, where quantize the sector bandwidth and utility, respectively, and is the number of iterations needed to comply with the required tolerance on the price of bandwidth. In each iteration of the MP, three instances of the SMP are solved until the subphase duration is determined to within a tolerance of . Thus, solving the MP in a distributed fashion requires broadcasting a total of (36)

Fig. 4. Deployment layout. 3 coordinated sectors serve 35 out of 40 besteffort users (5 MSs attached to BSs outside the coordinated sectors).

bits per frame. If we set bits, and , we get to a total feedback load of 2160 bits per frame. With a frame duration 10 ms, this represents 216 kb/s of total signaling load independently of the number of users. Attending to the results of Section V, this represents less than 1% of the sum rate delivered in a representative scenario. V. SIMULATION RESULTS While the proposed approach can be applied to any number of sectors in one or more cells, we concentrate on a scenario sectors of hexagonal cells of 1 km racoordinating dius with sector antennas pointing to the center of the cluster. Out-of-cluster interference from outer sectors is modeled as additional noise in the system (i.e., by increasing the penalizing gap ), as any further coordination between independently managed clusters is beyond the scope of this paper. 40 MSs are randomly distributed within the cluster such that two sectors of equal user density are lightly loaded and the third one has six times more load. MSs are attached to the sector BS with smaller path loss (including shadowing), drawn according to the WINNER II channel model [30] at 2.5 GHz carrier frequency with directive sector antennas [31] and omnidirectional MS antennas. The correction factor for the standard deviation of the shadowing is taken from [32], and the rest of physical parameters involved are listed in Table I.

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Fig. 5. Minimum per-user throughput in the coordinated area: highly loaded sector [left] and lowly loaded sectors [right]. The same legend applies to both gures.

TABLE II RELATIVE EXECUTION TIMES PER TRANSMISSION FRAME OF THE MATLAB IMPLEMENTATIONS OF ALL THE RESOURCE ALLOCATION STRATEGIES

For the deployment shown in Fig. 4, this resulted in , and users (the rest were anchored to an out-of-cluster sector BS) of a best-effort data service without any data latency or other QoS constraints than achieving the largest possible throughput. This is modeled by the user utility function [22]

(37) is the satisfaction level achieved when the where . By taking 1.5 Mb/s and , throughput is having all the users 90% satised implies an spectral efciency of 10.5 b/s/Hz. To prevent the possibility of having an excessive number of users scheduled in the same transmission frame, we limit the maximum number of active users per sector and frame to 10. Whenever a sector has more than 10 users attached, a time-domain scheduler selects at the beginning of each frame the ten active MSs that would have the smallest utilities if not scheduled. This criterion is consistent with the maxmin denition we used for sector utilities (5), but it should change if other denitions were used instead (e.g., if the sumrate were to be maximized, the users with largest SNRs should be prescheduled). The performance of the allocation strategy proposed in Section IV-B (labeled distributed) is benchmarked against the following uncoordinated schemes. Reuse 1: One band allocated to all cells, three sectors per cell, same band for all sectors. This corresponds to setting in our scheme.

Reuse 1/3: One band allocated to all cells, three sectors per cell, one disjoint and equal subband per sector. This and in our scheme. corresponds to setting SFR: bandwidth is divided in 3 subbands allocated 57%, 29%, and 14% of the BS power (corresponding to a 4:2:1 power split), uniformly within each subband. Only one sector BS can transmit with high power in each subband. To evaluate the potential losses of not doing any power control in the full reuse subphase, we also study the following variations of our scheme. Distributed ON/OFF: ON/OFF power control. Distributed PC: Discrete power controlEach sector BS . can transmit using 0%, 33%, 66%, or 100% of In Fig. 5, all the schemes are applied to the deployment of Fig. 4 using two antenna congurations: and . Coordination consistently outperforms the minimum user throughput per sector of any of the uncoordinated schemes, because short-term resource balancing results in smaller throughput disparity. Other load balancing approaches such as user association adaptation have been considered in the literature. However, exchanging bandwidth between sectors instead of changing user attachments seems to be a better option as this allows each MS to connect to the BS (including any out-of-cluster interference as with highest additional noise). Thus, for any given target rate, having larger reduces the required user bandwidth (freeing up resources) and/or power (decreasing interference). Additionally, we observe that power-controlled variations of the proposed schemes do not improve performance signicantly despite their larger computational load (see Table II). We shall hence rule out the distributed PC scheme for simplicity.

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Fig. 6. Per-user throughput that can be guaranteed with 90% probability: symmetric [left] and asymmetric [right] user distributions. Target rate R

= 1.5 Mb/s.

Fig. 7. Percentage of users achieving the target rate R

= 1.5 Mb/s: symmetric [left] and asymmetric [right] user distributions.

on the transmission frame, performance staid roughly constant when more complex variations were incorporated. Thus, the proposed coordination mechanism allows for better spectrum usage at reasonable complexity, which can be translated into savings in deployment costs as cell radius can increase without sacricing performance, and/or improved user satisfaction due to better QoS provisioning. APPENDIX A EXTENSION TO THE MIMO CASE Global optimality also holds in the MIMO case because are also convex. It sufces to prove that the MIMO versions of the right-hand sides of (11) and (15) are concave (adopting MIMO only modies the rate constraints, and not any of the allocation feasibility constraints). To that end, we start replacing expressions (1) and (2) by6 [see (38) and (39) at the top of the next page, respectively, where
6Notice that since no CSI other than path loss is available, transmit power is uniformly split across antennas.

Next, in Figs. 6 and 7 we xed the antenna conguration to , set the overall user density in the coordinated area to 15 users/km , and vary the cell radius to evaluate: 1) the throughput achieved by at least 90% of the users: and 2) the 1.5 Mb/s. percentage of users not achieving the target rate Results are averaged over 50 spatial realizations of one symmetric (33%, 33%, 33%) and another asymmetric (12.5%, 12.5%, 75%) user distribution. Again, coordinated algorithms outperform any uncoordinated scheme, showing robustness against asymmetries of the user distribution. Roughly speaking, for the simulating conditions shown here, coordination allows either a 10% increase of the cell radius with equal performance, or an extra 10% of satised users with the same cell radius. VI. CONCLUSION Centralized and distributed multi-sector coordination mechanisms for network utility maximization were proposed that signicantly outperformed reference uncoordinated schemes. Despite global optimality was achieved by xing some structure

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(38)

(39)

(42)

(44) (45) (46)

(47)

(48)

(49)

(50)

(51)

matrix , with pdf , is now used to denote the fading state at a given tone between the th sector , and the denitions of and now account BS and for the number of transmit antennas

Lemma 2 ([22]): A lower bound to the achievable rates of the orthogonal subphase is

(41) (40) Regarding the orthogonal subphase, we apply a more general version of Lemma 1 to remove from (38) lengthy expectations involving optimization variables. It provides us with another mathematically amenable, tight lower bound. where . Notice that the impact of MIMO in the lower bound is equivalent to having extra parallel channels. Thus, the same variable change of Section III-A can be applied to each of these virtual channels, replacing the logarithm of the right hand side of (11)

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by a sum of logarithms (each one having a different coefcient). By the same reasonings applied in the SISO case, each term of the sum is concave and thus the sum is also concave. The full reuse subphase is easier to analyze as the achievable , the only rates of (39) are still of the form becomes more involved (see (42)). difference being that APPENDIX B PROOF OF A CLOSED-FORM LOWER BOUND OF We shall concentrate in the MIMO case, where amounts to [see (42) shown at the top of the previous page]. In applications where complexity constraints are very stringent, the following lemma can be used to obtain an approximated, closed form to compute the right-hand side of (42). is Lemma 3: A closed-form lower bound of

(43) where .

Proof: Dene . Then [see (44)(51) at the top of the previous page], where (a) follows from [33, Corollary 2.5], b) is a consequence of Jensens , inequality applied to the function , and c) follows from Jensens inequality convex for all and the concavity of the logarithm. The right-hand side of (43) follows straightforwardly from (51). REFERENCES
[1] Y.-J. Chang, F.-T. Chien, and C.-C. J. Kuo, Cross-layer QoS analysis of opportunistic OFDM-TDMA and OFDMA networks, IEEE J. Sel. Areas Commun., vol. 25, pp. 657666, May 2007. [2] C. Y. Wong, R. S. Cheng, K. B. Letaief, and R. D. Murch, Multiuser OFDM with adaptive subcarrier, bit, and power allocation, IEEE J. Sel. Areas Commun., vol. 17, pp. 17471758, Oct. 1999. [3] E. Biglieri and G. Taricco, Transmission and Reception With Multiple Antennas: Theoretical Foundations. Delft, The Netherlands: Now Publishers, 2004. [4] D. Tse and P. Viswanath, Fundamentals of Wireless Communications. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005. [5] E. Biglieri, R. Calderbank, A. Constantinides, A. Goldsmith, A. Paulraj, and H. V. Poor, MIMO Wireless Communications. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007. [6] S. Das and H. Viswanathan, Interference mitigation through interference avoidance, in Proc. Asilomar Conf. Signals, Syst., Comput., Pacic Grove, CA, Nov. 2006, pp. 18151819. [7] K. Doppler, C. Wijting, and K. Valkealahti, Interference aware scheduling for soft frequency reuse, presented at the IEEE Veh. Technol. Conf., Barcelona, Spain, Apr. 2009. [8] M. Bohge, J. Gross, and A. Wolisz, Optimal power masking in soft frequency reuse based OFDMA networks, in Proc. Eur. Wireless Conf., Aalborg, Denmark, May 2009, pp. 162166. [9] R. Srinivasan and S. Hamiti, IEEE 802.16 m System Description Document (SDD) Tech. Rep. IEEE 802.16 m-09/0034r2, Sep. 2009. [10] A. L. Stolyar and H. Viswanathan, Self-organizing dynamic fractional frequency reuse for best-effort trafc through distributed inter-cell coordination, in Proc. INFOCOM, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Apr. 2009, pp. 12871295.

[11] R. Chang, Z. Tao, J. Zhang, and C. J. Kuo, A graph approach to dynamic fractional frequency reuse in multi-cell OFDMA networks, presented at the ICC Conf., Dresden, Germany, June 2009. [12] D. Gesbert, S. G. Kiani, A. Gjendemsj, and G. E. ien, Adaptation, coordination, and distributed resource allocation in interference-limited wireless networks, Proc. IEEE, vol. 95, no. 12, pp. 23932409, Dec. 2007. [13] J. Ellenbeck, C. Hartmann, and L. Berlemann, Decentralized intercell interference coordination by autonomous spectral reuse decisions, presented at the Eur. Wireless Conf., Prague, Czech Republic, Jun. 2008. [14] A. L. Stolyar and H. Viswanathan, Self-organizing dynamic fractional frequency reuse in OFDMA systems, presented at the INFOCOM, Phoenix, AZ, Apr. 2008. [15] C. Sankaran, F. Wang, and A. Ghosh, Performance of frequency selective scheduling and fractional frequency reuse schemes for WiMAX, presented at the Spring Veh. Technol. Conf., Barcelona, Spain, Apr. 2009. [16] O. Muoz, E. Calvo, J. Vidal, and A. Agustn, Downlink multi-cell radio resource management for coordinated base stations, in Spring Veh. Technol. Conf., Barcelona, Spain, Apr. 2009. [17] T. C.-Y. Ng and W. Yu, Joint optimization of relay strategies and resource allocations in cooperative cellular networks, IEEE J. Sel. Areas Commun., vol. 25, pp. 328339, Feb. 2007. [18] F. P. Kelly, A. Maulloo, and D. Tan, Rate control for communication networks: Shadow prices, proportional fairness, and stability, J. Oper. Res. Soc., vol. 49, pp. 237252, Mar. 1998. [19] X. Lin, N. B. Shroff, and R. Srikant, A tutorial on cross-layer optimization in wireless networks, IEEE J. Sel. Areas Commun., vol. 24, pp. 14521463, Aug. 2006. [20] D. P. Palomar and M. Chiang, Alternative distributed algorithms for network utility maximization: Framework and applications, IEEE Trans. Autom. Control, vol. 52, pp. 22542269, Dec. 2007. [21] IEEE Standard for Local and Metropolitan Area Networks, Part 16: Air Interface for Fixed and Mobile Broadband Wireless Access Systems, Amendment 2: Physical and Medium Access Control Layers for Combined Fixed and Mobile Operation in Licensed Bands, IEEE Std. 802.16e-2005, Dec. 2005. [22] E. Calvo, J. Vidal, and J. R. Fonollosa, Optimal resource allocation in relay-assisted cellular networks with partial CSI, IEEE Trans. Signal Process., vol. 57, pp. 28092823, Jul. 2009. [23] G. D. Forney, Jr. and M. V. Eyuboglu, Combined equalization and coding using precoding, IEEE Commun. Mag., vol. 29, no. 12, pp. 2534, Dec. 1991. [24] P. S. Chow, J. M. Ciof, and J. A. C. Bingham, A practical discrete multitone loading algorithm for data transmission over spectrally shaped channels, IEEE Trans. Commun., vol. 43, no. 2/3/4, pp. 773775, Feb./Mar./Apr. 1995. [25] F. Rashid-Farrokhi, K. J. R. Liu, and L. Tassiulas, Transmit beamforming and power control for cellular wireless systems, IEEE J. Sel. Areas Commun., vol. 16, pp. 14371450, Oct. 1998. [26] E. Bjrnson, R. Zakhour, D. Gesbert, and B. Ottersten, Cooperative multicell precoding: Rate region characterization and distributed strategies with instantaneous and statistical CSI, IEEE Trans. Signal Process., vol. 58, pp. 42984310, Aug. 2010. [27] K. Gomadam, V. R. Cadambe, and S. A. Jafar, A distributed numerical approach to interference alignment and applications to wireless interference networks, IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory, vol. 57, pp. 33093322, Jun. 2011. [28] S. P. Boyd and L. Vandenberghe, Convex Optimization. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004. [29] D. P. Palomar and M. Chiang, A tutorial on decomposition methods for network utility maximization, IEEE J. Sel. Areas Commun., vol. 24, no. 8, pp. 14391451, Aug. 2006. [30] Winner II Channel Models Part IIRadio Channel Measurement and Analysis Results, IST-4-027756 WINNER II, Sep. 2007, D1.1.2 V1.0. [31] R. Srinivasan et al., Draft IEEE 802.16 m Evaluation Methodology IEEE 802.16 m-07/037r1. [32] G. Senarath et al., Broadband Wireless Access Working GroupMulti-Hop Relay System Evaluation Methodology (Channel Model and Performance Metric) IEEE 802.16j-06/013r3. [33] L.-Z. Lu and C. E. M. Pearce, Some new bounds for singular values and eigenvalues of matrix products, Ann. Oper. Res., vol. 98, pp. 141148, 2000.

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Eduard Calvo received the Electrical Engineering and Ph.D. degrees (both with hons.) from the Universitat Politcnica de Catalunya (UPC), Barcelona, Spain, in 2004 and 2009, respectively. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Production, Technology, and Operations Management at IESE Business School, University of Navarra, Spain, which he joined in 2009. In 2004 and 2008, he held research appointments at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge. He has participated in several EC-funded projects. His research interests lie in the intersection of information theory, optimization theory, statistical signal processing, and their applications to wireless networks and operations research. Dr. Calvo was given the Salv i Campillo award to the Best Young Engineer by the Guild of Electrical Engineers of Catalonia in 2005.

Olga Muoz (M10) received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees, both in electrical engineering, from the Universitat Politcnica de Catalunya (UPC), Spain, in 1993 and 1998, respectively. In 1994, she joined the Department of Signal Theory and Communications at UPC, where she became an Associate Professor in 2001. She has participated in the European Commission funded projects such as ROMANTIK, FIREWORKS, ROCKET, and FREEDOM, in the topics of cooperative communications for multihop systems and coordinated radio resource allocation. Currently, she is leading the Spanish Government funded project MOSAIC, devoted to interference-aware coordination and cooperation techniques for macrocell and femtocell systems.

Josep Vidal (M91) received the Telecommunication Engineering and Ph.D. degrees from the Universitat Politcnica de Catalunya (UPC).. He is currently a Professor at UPC. From 1989 to 1990, he was an Associate Researcher at the Ecole Polytchnique Fdrale de Lausanne. Thereafter, he has held research appointments with INP Grenoble (1992), INP Toulouse (2006), and the University of Hawaii (2007). His research and teaching has turned around different topics in statistical signal processing, information theory, and communication theory, areas on which he has authored more than 140 journal and conference papers. Since 2000, he has led UPC participation in projects SATURN, FIREWORKS, ROMANTIK, ROCKET, and FREEDOM, of the 5th, 6th, and 7th Framework Programme of the European Commission, serving as Project Coordinator in the last three. He was co-organizer of several international workshops. Dr. Vidal is currently an Associate Editor of IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SIGNAL PROCESSING. and has served as Invited Editor in special issues of EURASIP Journals.

Adrin Agustn (S04A07M10) received the M.S. degrees in telecommunication engineering and electronic engineering and the Ph.D. degree from the Universitat Politcnica de Catalunya (UPC), Barcelona, Spain, in 2000, 2002, and 2008, respectively. From 2000 to 2002, he was with Indra-Espacio, Barcelona, Spain, working on the research and development of code synchronization techniques for DS-CDMA. In 2002, he joined the Signal Theory and Communications Department at UPC as a Research Assistant, and in 2008, he became a Research Associate. He has participated in the EC funded projects SATURN, ROMANTIK, FIREWORKS, ROCKET, and FREEDOM. His research interests include wireless multi-user MIMO, multihop systems, and relay-assisted transmission.