New coordinated beamforming scheme for multi-cell multi-user MIMO systems

As the development of next-generation wireless broadband cellular networks, base station (BS) cooperation has become a promising tool to increase the per-cell spectral efficiency as well as cell-edge user throughput. In this paper, we introduce a new multi-cell cooperation strategy, where each cooperating BS simultaneously serves two co-channel users, one from the cell edge and the other from the cell center. Three distributed coordinated beamforming schemes together with user pairing for the considered cooperative multi-cell multi-user MIMO system are proposed. Simulation results show that the signa- to-leakage-and-noise ratio (SLNR) based scheme and the ZF-SLNR scheme are able to considerably improve both the system total throughput and edge user throughput.