Effective resource block allocation procedure for quality of service provisioning in a single-operator heterogeneous LTE-A network

We consider the problem of resource block (RB) allocation in the integrated pico/macrocell Long Term Evolution - Advanced (LTE-A) network. It is assumed that the network is controlled by a single service provider (SP) and all the operation of the picocells is coordinated with a macro-network. To improve the quality of service (QoS) for end-to-end applications, we take into account the individual traffic demands of the users and allocate the RBs to minimize the sum of user utilities which are expressed in terms of the size of their queues. The formulated RB allocation problem belongs to the family of the multiple knapsack problems (MKPs) and, therefore, it is non-deterministic polynomial time (NP) hard in the strong sense. To reduce the complexity of this problem, we propose a simple heuristic technique to find the suitable (but not necessarily optimal) solution. The proposed RB allocation procedure requires only two additional signalling steps (necessary to maintain the coordination among different cells) and, therefore, its impact of the control signalling overhead is neglectable. It was shown (using OPNET-based simulations) that the proposed technique has low complexity, fast solution time, and shows improved performance when compared to other relevant schemes.