Activity Selection-Based Single Carrier-Frequency Division Multiple Access Uplink Scheduling for Two-Tier LTE Networks

This paper presents activity selection-based single carrier-frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA) uplink scheduling, which takes into account both co-tier and cross-tier interferences as well as the SC-FDMA contaminants of continuous resource allocation and robust modulation and coding scheme. Optimized frequency resource allocation is formulated as an activity selection problem that can be solved using a greedy method. Simulation results demonstrate the ability of the proposed method in reducing the average blocking rate, compared with round-robin, recursive maximum expansion, adaptive resource allocation and allocate as granted-robust SC-FDMA uplink scheduling schemes, thereby enhancing the average satisfaction rate, average data rate, and fairness index. To enhance the signal quality, co-tier interference is avoided through the application of a femtocell grouping scheme, while cross-tier interference is reduced through dedicated channel deployment. Simulation results to evaluate the proposed scheme demonstrated an improvement of between 3 and 61 % in overall throughput, compared with full channel reuse, conventional graph coloring and dedicated channel deployment schemes.