Coordinated scheduling and beamforming scheme for LTE-A HetNet exploiting direction of arrival

Resource reuse among heterogeneous cells in LTE-A networks permits to increase the spectral efficiency but requires suitable interference mitigation techniques. Among these Coordinated scheduling and beamforming (CS/CB) is a promising solution. This paper proposes a new CS/CB scheme aiming to maximizing the mean system throughput taking into account the fairness among the cells. First the most suitable CB technique selection is analysed and a sub-optimum criterion based on the reciprocal angular distance between two concurrent users is proposed. Then a smart CS algorithm that allows to pair users with sufficient angular distance is introduced. The results show that the proposed scheme achieves performance close to the optimum CB scheme selection and the smart allocation permits to increase significantly the system throughput.