On downlink coordinated scheduling for inter-cell interference alleviation with inter-BS cooperation

In multi-cell networks, cell-edge users tend to suffer severe inter-cell interference (ICI) from neighboring BSs, which prevents them from achieving high throughput. Coordinated multi-point transmission/reception (CoMP), as a key technology to improve the cell edge performance, has been widely investigated recently in wireless communication field. According to data sharing style, CoMP can be categorized into joint processing (JP) and coordinated scheduling/beamforming (CS/CB). In this paper, we focus on CS/CB, and propose a CS algorithm to mitigate ICI among collaborating BSs for the MU-MIMO case. In the proposed algorithm, the CoMP users are divided into different sets according to the significance of each interfering direction. Based on the interfering channel parallelity, the collaborating BSs provide eligible candidates for the serving BS, from which proper users are selected. Simulation results show the proposed algorithm improves the cell-edge performance compared with state-of-art CS schemes.