Outage efficient strategies for network MIMO with partial CSIT

We consider a multi-cell MIMO downlink (network MIMO) where B base-stations (BS) with M antennas, connected to a central station (CS), transmit K messages to K single-antenna user terminals (UT) simultaneously. Although many works have shown the potential benefits of network MIMO, the conclusion critically depends on the underlying assumption of perfect channel state information at transmitters (CSIT). In this paper, we propose an outage-efficient strategy that requires only partial CSIT. Namely, with side information of all UT's messages and local CSIT, each BS applies zero-forcing (ZF) beamforming in a distributed manner, which creates K parallel MISO channels. Based on the statistical knowledge of these parallel channels, the CS performs a robust power allocation that jointly minimizes the outage probability of K UTs and achieves a diversity gain of B(M − K + 1) per UT. Numerical results show that even with partial CSIT network MIMO can be beneficial by providing high data rates with a sufficient reliability to individual users.