Utility-based downlink power allocation in multicell wireless packet networks

This paper introduces a utility-based radio resource management technique in multicell wireless packet networks. In terms of allocation of base station (BS) downlink transmit power and assignment of resource to users in each cell, we formulate a problem of maximizing system utility which is defined as the sum of cell utilities. The problem, however, is not solvable due to its non-convex property. Thus, we propose a heuristic algorithm based on an intuition obtained from analyzing a simple two-cell problem. Though the heuristic approach also incurs signaling overhead for power coordination between neighboring base stations, it is much less than that of the original approach. Simulation results show the performance of our proposed algorithm compared with two competitive schemes: optimal and maximum power allocation schemes. As expected, the optimal allocation scheme shows the best performance but can not be employed in a real network due to intractable complexity. Our heuristic algorithm performs reasonably well with very low complexity.