Cooperative Opportunistic Scheduling in Multiple Antenna Cellular Networks

Multicell processing (MCP) techniques have attracted considerable research attention since they can effectively mitigate other-cell interference (OCI). However, the potential gain of MCP comes with several practical challenges including huge overhead and stringent synchronization requirements. In this paper, we propose cooperative opportunistic scheduling to coordinate OCI for downlink transmission in multiple antenna cellular networks, which incurs less overhead and relaxes synchronization requirements. As a baseline for comparison, we study the average throughput with noncooperative opportunistic scheduling and derive the throughput expression in closed form. We show that the scaling law of average throughput with noncooperative opportunistic scheduling follows the log log K form, where K is the number of users per cell. Furthermore, with the assumption that adjacent cells can exchange channel state information, we propose a cooperative opportunistic scheduler. Using extreme value theory, we obtain concise expression for the average throughput with the cooperative opportunistic scheduler, which is proven to scale like log K. Our analysis are verified by simulation results.