Future mobile communication systems will be designed to support a wide range of data rates with complex quality of service matrix. It is becoming more challenging to optimize the radio resource management and maximise the system capacity whilst meeting the required quality of service from user's point of view. Traditional schemes have approached this problem mainly focusing on resources within a cell and to large extent ignoring effects of multi-cell architecture. This paper addresses the

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... nce of multi-cell interference on overall radio resource utilisation and proposes a novel approach, setting a new direction for future research on resource scheduling strategies in a multicell system. It proposes a concept called Load Matrix (LM) which facilitates joint management of interference within and between cells for allocation of radio resources. Simulation results show significant improvement in the resource utilization and o verall network performance. Using the LM strategy, average cell throughput can be increased as much as 30% compared to a benchmark algorithm. Results also show that maintaining cell interference within a margin instead of a hard target can significantly improve resource utilization.