In recent years, as the number of users utilizing smartphones has explosively increased, the demand for mobile Internet services and multimedia has risen sharply. This has given impulse to active research, standardization, and development of improved communication systems. It is necessary for an improved communication system to have a high data rate and high frequency efficiency.
Various schemes to achieve high data rates and high frequency efficiency are under active discussion. Examples of such schemes may include: single-user and multi-user MIMO transmission, Coordinated Muli-Point (CoMP) technology aiming to increase the mean data rate within a cell and cell-edge user performance through effective interference control in cell boundary areas, and new cellular network architecture supporting a heterogeneous cell structure composed of a macrocell, picocell and femtocell to prevent performance degradation in a shadow area of an existing macro cell and to guarantee performance at a hot spot where heavy user data is generated.
In a multicell scheme raising the level of reuse of frequency and spatial resources in a mobile/wireless communication system, when communication entities transmit data independently of each other, it is inevitable for a user equipment (UE) to receive an interference signal. In particular, as a user equipment moves toward the cell edge region, the interference signal power increases and the data rate toward the base station sharply decreases.
To mitigate inter-cell interference, the base station may use a beamforming technique to adjust interference toward other cells, reducing the impact of interference on the system. Here, suitable user equipment selection by the base station may further increase overall system throughput by providing additional gains in addition to beamforming, i.e. further reducing inter-cell interference and increasing signal strength toward a desired user equipment.