Self-Optimizing Interference Management for the OFDMA Downlink

The next generations of wireless networks use OFDMA (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access) as the downlink radio transmission technology. With OFDMA, there is negligible interference between transmissions within a sector. However since transmissions in neighboring sectors may use the same frequency resources then such transmissions can cause interference. If this interference is too high then it negatively impacts the transmission rates achievable by users near the edge of the cell. Several approaches have been proposed to manage this cross-sector interference to achieve high sector throughput as well as acceptable performance for users near the cell edge. In this paper we summarize past approaches and then propose a simple distributed algorithm that requires no cross-sector coordination but achieves the desired performance characteristics. Since even the centralized version of this problem is intractable, our distributed algorithm is heuristic in nature but based on intuition gained from analytic results. Simplified simulation results are provided to support our claims.