LAUSR

Existing cellular technologies in unlicensed band such as license assisted access (LAA)-LTE do not capture inter-cell interference (ICI) management which becomes more important in modern small cell network environments. Moreover, existing ICI management techniques not only can be operated in only licensed frequency band due to their centralized properties, but also have high computational complexities. In this paper, by invoking distributed optimization, we propose a fully distributed base station (BS) activation and user scheduling framework which can be operated in even unlicensed band because of its competition properties. Our simulation results demonstrate that (i) proposed competitionbased BS activation and user scheduling framework (CBA) increases throughput of cell edge users by 112%–335% compared to conventional algorithms, (ii) the CBA properly catches up with the performance of optimal algorithm up to 93% in terms of overall performance and up to 95% in terms of edge user throughput, and (iii) the CBA also provides higher performance gains in the larger ratio of edge users and the smaller cell size, which indicates that the CBA well adapts to cellular network trend where cells are gradually smaller and densely deployed.