  Due to high system capacity requirement, 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) is
likely to adopt frequency reuse factor 1 at the cost of suffering severe
inter-cell interference (ICI). One of combating ICI strategies is network
cooperation of resource allocation (RA). For LTE uplink RA, requiring all the
subcarriers to be allocated adjacently complicates the RA problem greatly. This
paper investigates the joint multi-cell RA problem for LTE uplink. We model the
uplink RA and ICI mitigation problem using pure binary-integer programming
(BIP), with integrative consideration of all users' channel state information
(CSI). The advantage of the pure BIP model is that it can be solved by
branch-and-bound search (BBS) algorithm or other BIP solving algorithms, rather
than resorting to exhaustive search. The system-level simulation results show
that it yields 14.83% and 22.13% gains over single-cell optimal RA in average
spectrum efficiency and 5th percentile of user throughput, respectively.
