Cooperation-Multiuser Diversity Tradeoff in Wireless Cellular Networks

We introduce a new multiuser diversity scheme for interference management in cellular networks. A base station with K antennas communicates with at most K out of M mobile stations. It is proven that, if K ≪ M, then K independent data streams can be transmitted to K mobile stations with no need for cooperative joint decoding by such stations. This result is based on a new multiuser diversity concept that allows parallel communication in the network without any cooperation among mobile stations. If the network does not have enough mobile stations, then some of the users need to jointly decode their corresponding data streams. The result suggests the existence of a tradeoff between multiuser diversity and cooperation in the downlink of cellular networks. Our interference management approach is based on a new multiuser diversity concept that achieves the capacity of dirty paper coding (DPC) asymptotically. Surprisingly, this gain is achieved without requiring full channel state information (CSI) and only K integers related to CSI are fed back from mobile stations to the base station. An additional advantage of this scheme is the fact that the encoding and decoding of signals for this distributed MIMO system is based on simple point-to-point communications.