SINR Balancing Techniques in Coordinated Multi-Cell Downlink Systems

In this paper, we study coordinated multi-cell downlink systems where multiple base stations jointly design a transmission strategy by sharing channel state information. Particularly, we tackle the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) balancing problem to maximize the worst-user rate. We consider single-input single-output (SISO) interference channels (IFC) where all nodes are equipped with a single antenna, and there is one active user in each cell. First, achievable rate regions with symmetric complex (SC) and asymmetric complex (AC) signaling techniques are investigated. Then, we present the optimal and near-optimal SINR balancing algorithms with the SC signaling for two and three user SISO IFC. Due to residual interference, the worst-user rate of the SC signaling is saturated at high signal-to-noise-ratio region. To alleviate this problem, we also propose efficient balancing schemes based on the AC signaling for both two and three-user cases. Simulation results confirm effectiveness of the proposed SINR balancing algorithms and show that a substantial gain of the AC signaling is achieved over the SC signaling in terms of the maximum worst-user rate.