  This work addresses the problem associated with coordinating scheduling
decisions among multiple base stations in an LTE-Advanced downlink network in
order to manage inter-cell interference with a centralized controller. To solve
the coordinated scheduling problem an integer non-linear program is formulated
that, unlike most existing approaches, does not rely on exact channel state
information but only makes use of the specific measurement reports defined in
the 3GPP standard. An equivalent integer linear reformulation of the
coordinated scheduling problem is proposed, which can be efficiently solved by
commercial solvers. Extensive simulations of medium to large-size networks are
carried out to analyze the performance of the proposed coordinated scheduling
approaches, confirming available analytical results reporting fundamental
limitations in the cooperation due to out-of-cluster interference.
Nevertheless, the schemes proposed in this paper show important gains in
average user throughput of the cell-edge users, especially in the case of
heterogeneous networks.
