A clustered base transceiver station (BTS) coordination strategy is proposed for a large cellular MIMO network, which includes full intra-cluster coordination to enhance the sum rate and limited inter-cluster coordination to reduce interference for the cluster edge users. Multi-cell block diagonalization is used to coordinate the transmissions across multiple BTSs in the same cluster. To satisfy per-BTS power constraints, three combined precoder and power allocation algorithms are proposed with different performance and complexity tradeoffs. For inter-cluster coordination, the coordination area is chosen to balance fairness for edge users and the achievable sum rate. It is shown that a small cluster size (about 7 cells) is sufficient to obtain most of the sum rate benefits from clustered coordination while greatly relieving channel feedback requirement. Simulations show that the proposed coordination strategy efficiently reduces interference and provides a considerable sum rate gain for cellular MIMO networks.
, where neighboring BTSs cooperatively schedule their transmissions, is a practical strategy to reduce interference, as each time slot only one BTS in each cluster is transmitting and it only requires message change comparable to that for handoff. In @cite_21 , it was shown that one major advantage of intercell scheduling compared with conventional frequency reuse is the expanded multiuser diversity gain. The interference reduction is at the expense of a transmission duty cycle, however, and it does not make full use of the available spatial degrees of freedom.
@cite_21
2128192883
The capacity and robustness of cellular MIMO systems is very sensitive to other-cell interference which will in practice necessitate network level interference reduction strategies. As an alternative to traditional static frequency reuse patterns, this paper investigates intercell scheduling among neighboring base stations. We show analytically that cooperatively scheduled transmission, which is well within the capability of present systems, can achieve an expanded multiuser diversity gain in terms of ergodic capacity as well as almost the same amount of interference reduction as conventional frequency reuse. This capacity gain over conventional frequency reuse is O (M t square-root of log Ns) for dirty paper coding and O (min (Mr, Mt) square-root of log Ns) for time division, where Ns is the number of cooperating base stations employing opportunistic scheduling in an M t x M r MIMO system. From a theoretical standpoint, an interesting aspect of this analysis comes from an altered view of multiuser diversity in the context of a multi-cell system. Previously, multiuser diversity capacity gain has been known to grow as O(log log K), from selecting the maximum of K exponentially-distributed powers. Because multicell considerations such as the positions of the users, lognormal shadowing, and pathless affect the multiuser diversity gain, we find instead that the gain is O(square-root of 2logic K), from selecting the maximum of a compound Iognormal-exponential distribution. Finding the maximum of such a distribution is an additional contribution of the paper.