A coordinated multi-cell MU-MIMO scheme for the downlink LTE-advanced system

To further improve and satisfy the spectral efficiency requirements addressed in LTE-Advanced system, in this paper, a Coordinated Multi-Cell MU-MIMO scheme is proposed to achieve this goal, especially to enhance the cell-edge user(the 5% of user throughput) throughput substantially. In our proposed cooperative scheme, we adopt multi-cell block diagonalization (BD) algorithm to perform joint procession across the evolved coordinated eNodeBs to mitigate the inter-cell interference (ICI) so as to enhance the whole system performance. Proportional fair (PF) scheduling algorithm is also applied to guarantee the fairness between the users. Furthermore, different numbers of antennas employed at the eNodeB are considered and their affects on our proposed cooperative scheme are analyzed as well. Of course, a system simulation platform is established for the downlink LTE-Advanced system to evaluate the performance of this scheme from the system level perspective. Ultimately, from the simulation results, we can draw that the coordinated multi-cell MU-MIMO scheme we proposed is an effective approach to improve the spectral efficiency prominently and much more spectral efficient comparing to conventional non-cooperative MIMO scheme for the downlink LTE-Advanced system.