Multicell Scheduling in Network MIMO

We consider a coordinated multicell multiple-antenna downlink transmission in a cellular network also known as textit{network MIMO}, which is expected to play a key role in future broadband cellular systems. While clustered network MIMO is a practical scheme to benefit from multicell cooperation, it still suffers from inter-cluster (uncoordinated) interference especially for the cell-edge users. In this work, a multicell network scheduling scheme is proposed to minimize the uncoordinated interference, which introduces overlapping clusters. It also offers a novel model to study network MIMO systems. The block diagonalization (BD) scheme is revised so that it can be employed as a coordinated transmission method. Further, a subgradient iterative algorithm is derived to determine the precoder matrices for BD scheme. The proposed multicell network scheduling is shown to outperform that in the conventional clustered network MIMO under the per-cell power constraints.