Joint Opportunistic Scheduling in Multi-Cellular Systems

We address the problem of multiuser scheduling with partial channel information in a multi-cell environment. The scheduling problem is formulated jointly with the ARQ based channel learning process and the intercell interference mitigating cell breathing protocol. The optimal joint scheduling policy under various system constraints is established. The general problem is posed as a generalized Restless Multiarmed Bandit process and the notion of indexability is studied. We conjecture, with numerical support, that the multicell multiuser scheduling problem is indexable and obtain a partial structure of the index policy.