Coordinated User Scheduling with Transmit Beamforming in the Presence of Inter-Femtocell Interference

Deployment of multiple femtocells in a confined area may cause serious interference problem to each other. To mitigate the inter-femtocell interference, we consider combined use of coordinated user scheduling with transmit beamforming in femtocell networks. Femto base stations collaboratively schedule users to minimize the interference in an average sense and employ a beamforming technique to maximize the network spectral efficiency. We assume that only the transmit spatial correlation coefficient is shared by femto base stations, making it quite feasible for implementation. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is verifed by computer simulation in the presence of channel correlation.