A practical method of base-station cooperation for multi-cell multi-user MIMO systems

In traditional cellular networks, the capacity of downlink channels is limited by inter-cell interference (ICI). Basestation cooperation is a promising technique which yields large performance improvements by mitigating or eliminating ICI. However, many existing cooperation methods are far from practical due to intensive computational complexity. In this paper, we propose a practical method of base-station cooperation for multi-cell multi-user multi-input multi-output (MIMO) systems. This method is mainly composed of two parts - cooperative scheduling and cooperative precoding. For cooperative scheduling, we design a channel-dependent scheduling algorithm based on proportional fair scheduling (PFS). For cooperative precoding, we use multiuser eigenmode transmission (MET). The computational complexity of this method is acceptable. And it shows considerable potential in terms of spectrum efficiency.