The capacity gain from intercell scheduling in multi-antenna systems

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 (M_r, M_t) square-root of log Ns) for time division, where N_s 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.