A hybrid signalling scheme for cellular mobile networks over flat fading

Although recent studies have shown the potential benefits of base station (BS) cooperation technology, existing schemes rely on the assumptions of (i) perfect backbone links between the central network controller (CNC) and the base stations (BSs), and (ii) mobile stations (MSs) at the cell edges. The contribution of this paper is twofold. The authors first relax the aforementioned assumptions and present an in-depth investigation of their impact on the performance of conventional and BS cooperation transmission techniques. A hybrid signalling algorithm for cellular multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) networks that performs well under such non-ideal scenarios is then presented. The proposed algorithm outperforms the joint transmitter minimum mean squared error (JT-MMSE) method at low to moderate signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). It is also shown to be more robust to imperfect channel estimates than the JT-MMSE method.