Cooperative scheduling and power allocation scheme based on user clustering in LTE uplink

Inter-cell interference is serious in LTE co-channel networks, which becomes the bottleneck of outage performance enhancement in LTE networks. However, inter-cell interference is not considered when applying conventional single-cell scheduling algorithms in LTE uplink. A cooperative scheduling and power allocation scheme based on user clustering was proposed in order to mitigate inter-cell interference and enhance system performance, in which users from different cells who share the same resource blocks were clustered. The cooperative scheduling algorithm based on the proportional fair criterion was developed to allocate resourcs among user clusters. The cooperative power allocation was achieved by solving a set of power optimization problems formulated with interference among users in the same user cluster. The simulation result shows that the cooperative scheduling and power allocation scheme based on user clustering is efficient in terms of outage throughput, while greatly enhancing system throughput.