Cooperative MIMO multicell networks

Abstract

Recently, the pressing desire to provide cost-effective solutions aimed at supporting high-throughput broadband wireless access with large-scale coverage has significantly changed the notion of the traditional cellular systems. Physical layer cooperation serves as an enabling technology for such a change. In latest cellular networks, neighboring infrastructure stations, such as base stations (BSs) or relay stations (RSs), share their communication resources to create virtual multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems by means of distributed transmission and signal processing. Cooperative processing at the BSs promises to exceed the limits on spectral efficiency imposed by inter-cell interference, thereby allowing ever more aggressive frequency reuse patterns. On the other hand, cooperation between BSs and RSs, as well as among RSs, is expected to extend coverage and capacity of point-to-multipoint links between BSs and mobile stations in a highly economical fashion. However, to achieve such benefits in practice, numerous research challenges have to be still tackled. This special issue has come up with the intention of collecting cutting-edge research achievements in cooperative MIMO multicell systems. For this special issue, we have received 35 manuscript submissions altogether. After a careful review process, 10 manuscripts have been accepted for publication, which cover the following topics for cooperative MIMO multicell networks: channel modeling, power control and scheduling, interference management, protocol design and performance analysis, cost deployment, simulation tools and testbeds. A brief introduction of all the accepted manuscripts is reported in the following. In the manuscript “A Geometrical Three-Ring-Based Model for MIMO Mobile-to-Mobile Fading Channels in Cooperative Networks” by Talha and Patzold [1], a stochastic narrowband MIMO mobile-to-mobile reference channel model is derived in relay-based cooperative networks and exact closed-form expressions for different correlation functions are provided, under isotropic as well as non-isotropic scattering conditions. A stochastic simulation model is drawn from the reference model. It is shown that the cross-correlation functions of the simulation model closely approximate the corresponding ones of the reference model. In the article “Adaptive Coordinated Reception for Multicell MIMO Uplink” by Lu et al. [2], power control and receive beamforming are jointly optimized with adaptive selection of multiple BSs to minimize the total transmit power, under individual signal-to-interferenceplus-noise ratio constraint per mobile station. To reduce the complexity in the large-scale cellular network, a suboptimal algorithm is derived, which exhibits a good trade-off between performance and complexity if the number of the pre-selected BSs is carefully chosen. In the article “Virtual Cooperation for Throughput Maximization in Distributed Large-Scale Wireless Networks” by Abouei et al. [3], a distributed wireless network with K links is con-sidered, where the links are partitioned into M clusters each operating in a subchannel with bandwidth W/M. The power allocation and number of clusters of such a network are optimized for maximization of the throughput as the number of links approaches infinity. In the article “Distributed Cooperative Precoding with Power Control for Cellular Systems with Correlated Antennas at the Receiver” by Vinosh Babu James et al. [4], the authors consider an analytical model for a multicell and multiuser system with receiver-side correlation. A distributed protocol for cooperation amongst the BSs is also proposed. System performance gains measured in terms of mean and cell-edge spectral efficiency values are reported. In the article “Multimode Transmission in Network MIMO Downlink with Incomplete CSI” by Seifi et al. [5], a two-step scheduling algorithm for a cooperative multicell MIMO downlink is proposed: in the first step, joint user and mode selection is performed, whereas, in the second step, feedback and precoder design is carried out by only considering the users selected in the first step. The metric used to perform user and mode * Correspondence: f.verde@unina.it Department of Biomedical, Electronic and Telecommunication Engineering (DIBET), University of Naples Federico II, Naples, Italy Full list of author information is available at the end of the article Verde et al. EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing 2012, 2012:41 http://asp.eurasipjournals.com/content/2012/1/41