Multicell cooperation [Guest Editorial]

It is well recognized that the conventional cellular networks can no longer meet the user performance requirements in terms of throughput and coverage, which is due to the significant increase in the number of mobile users along with their traffic demands and the limited spectrum resource. This has stimulated the search for new approaches to alleviate this problem. Recently, cooperative communications at both the base station (BS) and mobile station (MS) levels has been proposed as a key technology to address this problem. Multicell cooperation is a new and emerging communication paradigm promising significant improvement in system capacity by mitigating intercell interference. It has been shown that, with the aid of multicell cooperation, a significant improvement of cellular system performance can be achieved, and the increase in throughput can be as large as an order of magnitude. Although the advantages of multicell cooperation have been demonstrated, many problems related to the research and development of practical and effective schemes for multicell cooperation exist. They have attracted considerable research attention in both academia and industry. This special issue of IEEE Wireless Communications puts together some recent results in the area of multicell cooperation for the next generation cellular wireless networks. It includes 11 articles, a brief account for each of which is provided below.