Managing inter-cell interference is one of the main challenges in current and next generation wireless systems that aggressively reuse the frequency. Cooperation between interfering cells has been sought to mitigate interference. In this paper, we address the problem of jointly optimizing the transmit powers, user scheduling, and user association in a cellular network to maximize the weighted sum rate (WSR). To this end, we develop a distributed interference penalty algorithm in which the cells update their transmit powers and user schedule to maximize its utility minus an interference cost.

The proposed algorithm involves only limited exchange of information via backhaul and has convergence guarantees. Furthermore, we propose a sub-optimal algorithm with lower computational and backhaul overhead. In it, the users are first associated to the base stations (BSs) based on their signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratios (SINRs). It is then followed by joint optimization of BS transmit powers and user scheduling, for which we develop an interference penalty algorithm as well. We show that the proposed algorithms outperform the computationally complex weighted minimum mean squared error (WMMSE) algorithm.

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