Multicell Coordinated Scheduling With Multiuser Zero-Forcing Beamforming

Coordinated scheduling/beamforming (CS/CB) is a cost-effective coordinated multipoint (CoMP) transmission paradigm that has been incorporated in the recent long-term evolution cellular standard. In this paper, we study CS/CB with the aim of developing low-complexity multicell coordinated user scheduling policies. We focus on a class of multicell interfering broadcast networks in which base stations have only local data and local channel state information, but each has sufficient antennas to serve multiple users using zero-forcing beamforming. The coordination problem is formulated as finding scheduling decisions across the cells such that the network sum rate is maximized. Starting from the two-cell model, we uncover the structure for a good scheduling decision, which in turn leads to the definition of two distributed scheduling policies of differing complexity and intercell coordination. Asymptotic theoretical bounds on the average sum rate are derived to predict the performance of the policies proposed. We extend to some example networks containing more than two cells and develop network-wide coordination policies. Numerical results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed policies and shed light on practical coordinated system design.