In this paper, we propose a series of novel coordination schemes for multi-cell downlink communication. Starting
from full base station (BS) coordination, we first propose a
fully-coordinated scheme to exploit beneficial effects of both
inter-cell and intra-cell interference, based on sharing both
channel state information (CSI) and data among the BSs. To
reduce the coordination overhead, we then propose a partiallycoordinated scheme where only intra-cell interference is designed
to be constructive while inter-cell is jointly suppressed by the
coordinated BSs. Accordingly, the coordination only involves
CSI exchange and the need for sharing data is eliminated.
To further reduce the coordination overhead, a third scheme
is proposed, which only requires the knowledge of statistical
inter-cell channels, at the cost of a slight increase on the
transmission power. For all the proposed schemes, imperfect
CSI is considered. We minimize the total transmission power in
terms of probabilistic and deterministic optimizations. Explicitly,
the former statistically satisfies the users’ signal-to-interferenceplus-noise ratio (SINR) while the latter guarantees the SINR
requirements in the worst case CSI uncertainties. Simulation
verifies that our schemes consume much lower power compared
to the existing benchmarks, i.e., coordinated multi-point (CoMP)
and coordinated-beamforming (CBF) systems, opening a new
dimension on multi-cell coordination
