On the principles of multicell precoding with centralized and distributed cooperation

Cooperative precoding is an attractive way of improving the performance in multicell downlink scenarios. By serving each terminal through multiple surrounding base stations, inter-cell interference can be coordinated and higher spectral efficiency achieved, especially for terminals at cell edges. The optimal performance of multicell precoding is well-known as it can be treated as a single cell with distributed antennas. However, the requirements on backhaul signaling and computational power scales rapidly in large and dense networks, which often makes such fully centralized approaches impractical. In this paper, we review and generalize some recent work on multicell precoding with both centralized and distributed cooperation. We propose practical precoding strategies under Rician channel conditions, and illustrate how the major gain of multicell precoding originates from having good base station synchronization and not from making centralized precoding decisions.