A novel distributed power allocation scheme for coordinated multicell systems

Coordination between base stations (BSs) is a promising solution for cellular wireless systems to mitigate intercell interference, improving system fairness, and increasing capacity in the years to come. The aim of this manuscript is to propose a new distributed power allocation scheme for the downlink of distributed precoded multicell MISO-OFDM systems. By treating the multicell system as a superposition of single cell systems we define the average virtual bit error rate (BER) of one single-cell system, allowing us to compute the power allocation in a distributed manner at each BS. The precoders are designed in two phases: first the precoder vectors are computed in a distributed manner at each BS considering two criteria, distributed zero-forcing and virtual signal-to-interference noise ratio; then the system is optimized through distributed power allocation with per-BS power constraint. The proposed power allocation scheme minimizes the average virtual BER over all user terminals and the available subcarriers. Both the precoder vectors and the power allocation are computed by assuming that the BSs have only knowledge of local channel state information. The performance of the proposed scheme is compared against other power allocation schemes that have recently been proposed for precoded multicell systems based on LTE specifications. The results also show that although our power allocation scheme is based on the minimization of the virtual uncoded BER, it also has significant gains in coded systems.