Interference channel state based user-centric cell clustering for uplink multicell cooperation

Cooperative receiving has been recognized as an effective technique to mitigate inter-cell interference (ICI) for the uplink of multicell wireless systems. However, how to cluster the cooperative cells effectively is critical to the subsequent multicell signal processing and the corresponding performance improvement. A dynamic user-centric clustering scheme based on the interference channel strength is proposed in this work. Specifically, the cooperation opportunity of a base station (BS) is considered as limited resources because both the cooperative signal processing and the information exchange through backhaul would impose additional resource consumption to the BSs involved in the cooperation. In order to benefit from cooperation of the BSs, mobile users located within the coverage of the cooperative cells compete for the BS cooperation opportunities based on their interfering channel states, which create user-centric clusters that change dynamically with the channel states. A hierarchical pre-clustering scheme is proposed to further reduce the computational complexity of the clustering algorithm. Simulation results show that with modest computational complexity, the proposed user-centric clustering scheme is capable of achieving good tradeoff between cooperative gains and costs by avoiding excess cooperation burden on any particular BS.