A Novel Network Optimization Method for Cooperative Massive MIMO Systems

Capacity-coverage tradeoff balancing is a classical but critical problem for practical wireless multi- cell network optimization. Increasing the average capacity is often at the expense of decreasing the cell coverage and vice versa. It becomes more complex in massive multiple-input/multiple-output (MIMO) networks to balance the above two performance indicators since capacity is much highly improved while the inter-cell interference is also increased greatly under massive antenna scenarios. In this work, a novel system-level optimization parameter is proposed, namely minimum user signal to interference plus noise ratio (user-SINR) threshold, to solve the above balancing problem. By utilizing this new parameter, the corresponding user scheduling and inter-cell interference coordination scheme are further provided for cooperative massive MIMO networks. Performance analysis and numerical results show that the proposed minimum user-SINR threshold is a very effective optimization parameter to achieve the capacity-coverage tradeoff performance with lower optimization complexity, combined with the proposed scheduling and interference coordination schemes.