Inter-cell coordinated beamforming with opportunistic scheduling

This paper proposes a distributed coordination framework with opportunistic scheduling among multiple users as opposed to the existing works on the multiple-cell cooperative beamforming problem that deals with a single active user in each cell. In this cross-layer design framework that deals with the beamforming in the physical layer and multiuser scheduling in the upper layer, radio resource management and inter-cell coordination issues are jointly considered to improve the cell-edge throughput performance by trading off their individual benefit in an optimal manner. Our simulation results demonstrated that its performance can reach up to 85% of its upper bound at the cell boundary.