Channel norm-based user scheduler in coordinated multi-point systems

In this paper, we address the problem of user scheduling in downlink coordinated multi-point transmission (CoMP) systems, where multiple users are selected and then served with zero forcing beamformer simultaneously by several cooperative base stations (BSs). To reduce the enormous overhead led by obtaining full channel state information at the transmitter, a low-feedback user scheduling method called channel norm-based user scheduler (NUS), is proposed by exploiting the asymmetric channel feature of CoMP systems. Simulation results show that the channel norm provides sufficient information for user scheduling when each BS has one antenna, where the performance gap between the NUS and the greedy user selection (GUS) is negligible with respect to both the cell average throughput and the cell edge throughput. When each BS has multiple antennas, NUS is inferior to GUS, but still significantly outperforms the uncoordinated systems.