EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking
Volume 2004 (2004), Article ID 202654, 14 pages
doi:10.1155/S1687147204406148
Cochannel Interference Mitigation and Cooperative Processing in Downlink Multicell Multiuser MIMO Networks
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695-7911, USA
Received 1 December 2003; Revised 12 July 2004
Abstract
Recently, the remarkable capacity potential of
multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless communication
systems was unveiled. The predicted enormous capacity gain of
MIMO is nonetheless significantly limited by cochannel
interference (CCI) in realistic cellular environments. The
previously proposed advanced receiver technique improves the
system performance at the cost of increased receiver complexity,
and the achieved system capacity is still significantly away from
the interference-free capacity upper bound, especially in
environments with strong CCI. In this paper, base station
cooperative processing is explored to address the CCI mitigation
problem in downlink multicell multiuser MIMO networks, and is
shown to dramatically increase the capacity with strong CCI. Both
information-theoretic dirty paper coding approach and several
more practical joint transmission schemes are studied with pooled
and practical per-base power constraints, respectively. Besides
the CCI mitigation potential, other advantages of cooperative
processing including the power gain, channel rank/conditioning
advantage, and macrodiversity protection are also addressed. The
potential of our proposed joint transmission schemes is verified
with both heuristic and realistic cellular MIMO settings.