Maximizing the capacity of large wireless networks: Optimal and distributed solutions

We analyze the sum capacity of multicell wireless networks with full resource reuse and channel-driven opportunistic scheduling in each cell. We address the problem of finding the co-channel (throughout the network) user assignment that results in the optimal joint multicell capacity, under a resource-fair constraint and a standard power control strategy. This problem in principle requires processing the complete co-channel gain information, and thus, has so far been justly considered unpractical due to complexity and channel gain signaling overhead. However, we expose here the following key result: The multicell optimal user scheduling problem admits a remarkably simple and fully distributed solution for large networks. This result is proved analytically for an idealized network. From this constructive proof, we propose a practical algorithm that is shown to achieve near maximum capacity for realistic cases of simulated networks of even small sizes.