A Novel Cooperative Multi-Cell MIMO Scheme for the Downlink of LTE-Advanced System

LTE-Advanced system which based on orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) can eliminate intra-cell interference but still can not mitigate inter-cell interference (ICI). In this paper, we propose a novel cooperative multi-cell multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) scheme for LTE-Advanced system to reduce ICI and improve the cell capacity. By sharing information such as data and channel state information (CSI) across multiple evolved NodeBs (eNB) and configuring joint precoding at cooperative transmitters, the ICI may be mitigated or even beneficial. Multi-cell block diagonalization (BD) algorithm is used to coordinate the transmissions across multiple eNBs for downlink. To guarantee fairness of the cell-edge users, round robin (RR) scheduling is applied. Simulation results for downlink show that the proposed multi-cell MIMO scheme can significantly improve the average cell throughput and reduce ICI for the cell-edge users.