To appear on Springer Wireless Networks journal (accepted March 2015) The final publication is available at Springer via

Abstract—In LTE-Advanced, the same spectrum can be re-used in neighboring cells, hence coordinated scheduling is employed to improve the overall network performance (cell throughput, fairness, and energy efficiency) by reducing inter-cell interference. In this paper, we advocate that large-scale coordination can be obtained through a layered solution: a cluster of few (i.e., three) cells is coordinated at the first level, and clusters of coordinated cells are then coordinated at a larger scale (e.g., tens of cells). We model both small-scale coordination and large-scale coordination as optimization problems, show that solving them at opti-mality is prohibitive, and propose two efficient heuristics that achieve good results, and yet are simple enough to be run at every Transmission Time Interval (TTI). Detailed packet-level simulations show that our layered approach outperforms the existing ones, both static and dynamic. Index Terms—LTE-A, Coordinated Scheduling, CoMP, Optimizatio