Scheduling dependent modeling of inter-cell interference in UMTS EUL

In this paper we analyze the performance of the UMTS Enhanced Uplink (EUL) in a network scenario, under various packet scheduling schemes. Besides the impact of the intrinsic differences of the scheduling schemes on EUL performance (which we studied in a previous paper for a single cell scenario), we are particularly interested in how the different scheduling schemes influence EUL performance through their impact on the characteristics of the inter-cell interference. For our analysis we use a hybrid analytical/simulation approach, originally developed for the single cell situation, and extend it to our multi cell scenario. We show that the mutual influence between neighbouring cells due to inter-cell interference is largely determined by only one or two power iteration steps, which considerably speeds up computations. Our approach takes into account both the packet-level characteristics and the flow-level dynamics due to the random user behaviour. For the considered schedulers we evaluate and compare performance measures such as the mean flow transfer time and throughput.