User-oriented intercell interference coordination in heterogeneous networks (HetNets)

HetNet is a hot research topic in the next generation broadband wireless access network and mitigating the intercell interference could improve the system throughput. Users care whether their requested data rates can be satisfied or not the most. Hence a user-centric intercell interference coordination scheme (i.e. resource allocation scheme considering user request) is necessary. In this paper, at each specific subframe, when users have data requests, the corresponding base station first selects which user to serve based on each user's 'instant data rate', data rate request and capacity gained. Then given the users selected, a method is proposed to help choose which intercell interference coordination scheme to use in order to maximize the users' data rate satisfaction ratios. Intensive simulations are conducted and the results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves considerable gains over competing schemes in terms of the data rate satisfaction ratio and system capacity in Config.4b scenarios defined by 3GPP.