Inter-Cluster Interference Management Based on Cell-Clustering in Network MIMO Systems

The concept of "Network MIMO" in which a set of access points (APs) form a cluster and cooperatively serve each user in the network has received much attention to enhance the performance of the users at cell boundary. Thus, in a network MIMO-based system, interference from neighboring clusters becomes a dominant factor to decide the spectral efficiency of the system. In this paper, we propose an efficient cell-clustering algorithm that can systematically determine a set of cooperative APs in the network. Through simulation, we observe the improved performance of the proposed cell-clustering algorithm in terms of the sum-rate and the outage probability compared with a non-adaptive cell-clustering algorithm.