Multicell cooperative systems with multiple receive antennas

Multicell cooperation may play an important role in achieving high performance in cellular systems. Multicell cooperation with a single receive antenna at the mobile station has been widely investigated. Applying cooperation with multiple receive antennas, allowed in several emerging wireless standards, has met with some challenges. This is primarily because the transmit precoding/beamforming vector and receive processing have to be jointly optimized in multiple cells to combat out-of-cell interference. In this article, we first discuss the role of the receive antennas in a multicell environment, and then review recently proposed multicell cooperative algorithms and receive antenna techniques for different interference statistics. Finally, we highlight recent work on the fundamental limits of cooperation and the possibility of overcoming such limits by using multiple receive antennas in multicell cooperative networks.