Cell-grouping based distributed beamforming and scheduling for multi-cell cooperative transmission

Base station cooperative transmission is an effective strategy to mitigate inter-cell interference. Centralized multi-cell transmission provides considerable performance gains but is impractical in large cellular systems, due to its prohibitive complexity and large amount of overhead. Dividing cells into small clusters enables practical channel acquisition and coordination within each cluster but still suffers from out-of-cluster interference. In this paper, we propose a dynamic cooperative framework for large cellular systems, which divides cells into groups such that neighboring cells belong to different groups. Based on the cell-grouping, a distributed scheduling strategy is proposed which can effectively coordinate the interference between cell-groups. With limited signalling among BSs and lower complexity, the cell-grouping based distributed scheduling and beamforming shows performance advantages over the fixed clustering based centralized scheduling and beamforming.