Distributed Multicell-MISO Precoding Using the Layered Virtual SINR Framework

In this letter, we address the problem of distributed multi-antenna cooperative transmission in a cellular system. Most research in this area has so far assumed that base stations not only have the data dedicated to all the users but also share the full channel state information (CSI). In what follows, we assume that each base station (BS) only has local CSI knowledge. We propose a suboptimal, yet efficient, way in which the multicell MISO precoders may be designed at each BS in a distributed manner, as a superposition of so-called virtual SINR maximizations: a virtual SINR maximizing transmission scheme yields Pareto optimal rates for the MISO Interference Channel (IC); its extension to the multicell MISO channel is shown to provide a distributed precoding scheme achieving a certain fairness optimality for the two link case. We illustrate the performance of our algorithm through Monte Carlo simulations.