Multicell zero-forcing beamforming and multiuser scheduling

In this paper we study coordinated multicell zero-forcing beamforming (ZFBF) together with downlink scheduling. Optimal scheduling requires a network-wide search through all scheduling combinations which is generally not feasible. To this end we propose a distributed scheduling algorithm. To put the performance in perspective we use single-cell processing (SCP) with optimal scheduling as a reference. Specifically, we derive approximate expressions for the number of users needed to attain the same mean post-scheduling SINR with SCP and ZFBF. We generalize to similar results for the capacity and show that large gains can be obtained with multicell ZFBF.