On the performance of decentralized cell edge coordinated scheduling in small cell clusters with different densities

With the expected increase in data traffic by multiple hundredfolds in the coming years, future networks will experience more and more deployment of small cells with or without detailed network planning to increase the network capacity. Networks populated with such dense clusters of small cells will likely encounter very high interference. Thus there is an urgent need to develop strategies that could help to avoid such high interference especially for cell edge users in small cell clusters. In this paper, a decentralized cell edge coordinated scheduling (CECS) has been investigated for the performance of users at varying inter-site distance especially in the overlapped regions. For certain cluster densities CECS brings significant increase in the per cell edge user throughput. It is also observed that for a certain guaranteed bit rate (GBR) the coordinated approach outperforms the other schemes such as Full Reuse (FR) and fractional frequency reuse (FFR) in the sense of the mean user throughput and the amount of satisfied users in all the considered scenarios.