Efficient Matching for Almost Blank Subframes Allocation in Ultra Dense Networks

The explosive growth of mobile traffic needs that the fifth generation of wireless systems supports a thousand-fold increase of network capacity, thanks to new paradigms such as network densification. However, in dense networks interference can be a limiting factor, and must be suitably managed. In this paper multiple cells coordinate to mitigate the mutual interference: cross-tier interference is limited by means of the traditional enhanced Inter Cell Interference Coordination approach, while a new co-tier interference management strategy based on Matching Theory is proposed. The objective is to provide a stable matching between the set of small cells and the set of available subframes left almost blank by the macrocell and used by the small cells to communicate with their most vulnerable users. The proposed solution aims at improving the throughput of most critical users with an affordable computational complexity. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme has been verified in comparison with benchmark methods.