Coordination and cooperation for next generation wireless systems- overhead signalling requirements and cross layer considerations

In the evolution of wireless systems to the next generation, it is becoming increasingly important to offer substantial improvements, not only in terms of peak and average cell rates but also in terms of outage performance. To this end, interference management by means of coordination between different base stations and coverage/capacity improvements by means of cooperation with relays are considered potential candidate technologies. The introduction of multiuser MIMO processing principles and cross-layer optimized resource allocation may offer promising performance gains for coordination and cooperation but their feasibility depends on overhead signaling constraints and system deployment assumptions. In this paper, we present two realistic approaches for coordination and cooperation, analyze their performance merits and discuss their complexity requirements.