Evaluation of Inter-Cell Interference Coordination with CAP model

Abstract

More cooperation or coordination is necessary for future UDN (Ultra-Dense Network) scenario of 5G network, of which ICIC (Inter-Cell Interference Coordination) is a promising and typical scheme. Cooperating cellular network may be thought as a special kind of distributed computing system, whose basic theory and toolsets could be adopted. CAP theory for distributed computing state that any networked shared-data system can have at most two of three desirable properties: consistency (C), high availability (A) and tolerance to network partitions (P) of the data. Since partition could not be avoided in such system, consistency or availability has to be forfeited to a certain extent. This paper extends the CAP theorem to the UDN case, and redefines the consistency, availability and partition-tolerance in the context of future cellular network architecture. Then ICIC process are interpreted with cellular CAP theorem, and the evaluation framework is developed. An improved ICIC scheme is proposed based on such framework.