Multi-Cell Interference Exploitation: A New Dimension in Cell Coordination

TL;DR

This paper introduces innovative multi-cell coordination schemes that exploit interference beneficially, reducing power consumption and coordination overhead while maintaining SINR requirements, even with imperfect CSI.

Contribution

It presents three novel coordination schemes that balance performance and overhead, including fully, partially, and statistically coordinated methods, considering imperfect CSI.

Findings

Proposed schemes significantly reduce transmission power compared to benchmarks.

Partially-coordinated scheme eliminates data sharing, lowering overhead.

Simulation results confirm efficiency and robustness of the new schemes.

Abstract

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 partially-coordinated 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-interference-plus-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.