Inter-sector beamforming with MMSE receiver in the downlink of TDD cellular systems

The use of beamforming is effective for users in limited power environments. However, when it is applied to the downlink of a cellular system with universal frequency reuse, users near the sector boundary may experience significant interference from more than one sector. The use of a minimum mean square error (MMSE)-type receiver may not sufficiently cancel out the interference unless a sufficient number of receive antennas are used. In this paper, we consider the use of inter-sector beamforming that cooperates with a neighboring sector in the same cell to mitigate this interference problem in time-division duplex (TDD) environments. The proposed scheme can avoid interference from an adjacent sector in the same cell, while enhancing the transmit array gain by using the TDD reciprocity. The performance of the proposed scheme is analyzed in terms of the output signal-to-interference-plus-noise power ratio (SINR) and the output capacity when applied to an MMSE-type receiver. The beamforming mode can be analytically switched between the inter-sector and the single-sector mode based on the long-term channel information. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed scheme is verified by computer simulation.