Towards the Optimal Pattern of Joint Beamforming, User Scheduling and Power Allocation in a multi-RAT Network

Multiple solutions for the coexistence of different radio access technologies operating in the same frequency band have been proposed for 5G and WiFi. Most solutions based on spatial division just consider a small amount of radio access points, one link direction, and/or a single radio access technology. As a consequence, the performance of these solutions on realistic wireless network deployments may be poor and difficult to estimate. This paper investigates the serving of multiple users by multiple radio access technologies with the objective of minimizing the interference among network nodes. This is done by jointly optimizing the beams and link directions as well as the transmission powers, so as to ensure fair and near-optimal throughput allocation over time. For this purpose, a generalized beam-gain model for small-scale antenna arrays is proposed. We evaluate our proposed solution for realistic network scenarios in order to show its effectiveness.