Decentralized nonlinear precoding algorithm for multi-cell coordinated systems

Multi-cell coordinated system is an attractive way of improving data rate, by serving one user through several base stations (BSs). BSs might share both data and their channel state information (CSI), but the demand on backhaul capacity makes it inflexible. In this paper, we consider the case with BSs sharing data dedicated to users but having only local CSI, and propose a decentralized nonlinear precoding algorithm for multi-cell coordinated system with multi-stream multi-antenna users. The proposed algorithm is designed to eliminate the inter-user interference and the inter-stream interference, and meanwhile to achieve equal performance for streams of each user. In the proposed algorithm, Tomlinson-Harashima precoding is applied to eliminate partial interference, and transmit space matrix is designed to eliminate the other interference. After the interference elimination, closed-form expression of the transmit and receive processing matrix are derived to maximize the minimum signal to interference plus noise ratio for streams of each user. Simulation results show that, compared with the decentralized linear precoding, the proposed algorithm achieves better performance.