On the potential of broadcast CSI for opportunistic Coordinated Multi-Point transmission

Coordinated Multi-Point transmission is a promising technique to improve the performance of the users at the cell-edge. To achieve this, in case of a centralized approach, users need to unicast the quantized channel state information (CSI), typically to the anchor base station (BS), and then each BS forwards this information to a central coordination node for precoding and scheduling. In the case of a decentralized approach, users broadcast the quantized CSI such that the coordinating BSs could simultaneously receive the CSI. The advantage of a decentralized approach is that it does not require a central coordination node, thereby not imposing stringent latency constraints on the backhaul. The CSI transmission over the erroneous feedback channel in the uplink gives rise to precoding loss and scheduling loss. In the decentralized framework, the feedback errors could result in BSs receiving a different version of the CSI. In this work, we propose a decentralized opportunistic scheduling approach, which only requires a minimal sharing of scheduling information between BSs. The results show that the sum rate achieved with the proposed method is comparable to that of the centralized approach even when there is a high bit error probability introduced by the feedback channel. We also show that when the bit error probabilities in the feedback channel are less than 10^-4, the decentralized approach achieves the sum rate of the centralized approach.