Distributed probabilistic-data-association-based soft reception employing base station cooperation in MIMO-aided multiuser multicell systems

Intercell cochannel interference (CCI) mitigation is investigated in the context of cellular systems relying on dense frequency reuse (FR). A distributed base-station (BS)-cooperation-aided soft reception scheme using the probabilistic data association (PDA) algorithm and soft combining (SC) is proposed for the uplink of multiuser multicell MIMO systems. The realistic 19-cell hexagonal cellular model relying on unity FR is considered, where both the BSs and the mobile stations (MSs) are equipped with multiple antennas. Local-cooperation-based message passing is used, instead of a global message passing chain for the sake of reducing the backhaul traffic. The PDA algorithm is employed as a low-complexity solution for producing soft information, which facilitates the employment of SC at the individual BSs to generate the final soft decision metric. Our simulations and analysis demonstrate that, despite its low additional complexity and backhaul traffic, the proposed distributed PDA-aided SC (DPDA-SC) reception scheme significantly outperforms the conventional noncooperative benchmarkers. Furthermore, since only the index of the possible discrete value of the quantized converged soft information has to be exchanged for SC in practice, the proposed DPDA-SC scheme is relatively robust to the quantization errors of the soft information exchanged. As a beneficial result, the backhaul traffic is dramatically reduced at negligible performance degradation

Adaptive Bit Partitioning for Multicell Intercell Interference Nulling with Delayed Limited Feedback

Base station cooperation can exploit knowledge of the users' channel state information (CSI) at the transmitters to manage co-channel interference. Users have to feedback CSI of the desired and interfering channels using finite-bandwidth backhaul links. Existing codebook designs for single-cell limited feedback can be used for multicell cooperation by partitioning the available feedback resources between the multiple channels. In this paper, a new feedback-bit allocation strategy is proposed, as a function of the delays in the communication links and received signal strengths in the downlink. Channel temporal correlation is modeled as a function of delay using the Gauss-Markov model. Closed-form expressions for bit partitions are derived to allocate more bits to quantize the stronger channels with smaller delays and fewer bits to weaker channels with larger delays, assuming random vector quantization. Cellular network simulations are used to show that the proposed algorithm yields higher sum-rates than an equal-bit allocation technique.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, July 201

Adaptive Spatial Intercell Interference Cancellation in Multicell Wireless Networks

Downlink spatial intercell interference cancellation (ICIC) is considered for mitigating other-cell interference using multiple transmit antennas. A principle question we explore is whether it is better to do ICIC or simply standard single-cell beamforming. We explore this question analytically and show that beamforming is preferred for all users when the edge SNR (signal-to-noise ratio) is low ($<0$ dB), and ICIC is preferred when the edge SNR is high ($>10$ dB), for example in an urban setting. At medium SNR, a proposed adaptive strategy, where multiple base stations jointly select transmission strategies based on the user location, outperforms both while requiring a lower feedback rate than the pure ICIC approach. The employed metric is sum rate, which is normally a dubious metric for cellular systems, but surprisingly we show that even with this reward function the adaptive strategy also improves fairness. When the channel information is provided by limited feedback, the impact of the induced quantization error is also investigated. It is shown that ICIC with well-designed feedback strategies still provides significant throughput gain.Comment: 26 pages, submitted to IEEE J. Select. Areas Commun. special issue on Cooperative Communications in MIMO Cellular Networks, Sept. 200

Adaptive Multicell 3D Beamforming in Multi-Antenna Cellular Networks

We consider a cellular network with multi-antenna base stations (BSs) and single-antenna users, multicell cooperation, imperfect channel state information, and directional antennas each with a vertically adjustable beam. We investigate the impact of the elevation angle of the BS antenna pattern, denoted as tilt, on the performance of the considered network when employing either a conventional single-cell transmission or a fully cooperative multicell transmission. Using the results of this investigation, we propose a novel hybrid multicell cooperation technique in which the intercell interference is controlled via either cooperative beamforming in the horizontal plane or coordinated beamfroming in the vertical plane of the wireless channel, denoted as adaptive multicell 3D beamforming. The main idea is to divide the coverage area into two disjoint vertical regions and adapt the multicell cooperation strategy at the BSs when serving each region. A fair scheduler is used to share the time-slots between the vertical regions. It is shown that the proposed technique can achieve performance comparable to that of a fully cooperative transmission but with a significantly lower complexity and signaling requirements. To make the performance analysis computationally efficient, analytical expressions for the user ergodic rates under different beamforming strategies are also derived.Comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE Transaction on Vehicular Technolog