User-centric downlink cooperative transmission with orthogonal beamforming based limited feedback

With the increase of cell density and explosive growth of data traffic, user centric is becoming one of the design principles of next-generation cellular networks. One meaning of user centric lies in that no matter where a user is located, its demand in quality of service (QoS) will be guaranteed in high probability. One approach to achieve such an ambitious goal is allowing each user to select several preferred base stations to transmit cooperatively. In this paper, we propose a user-centric downlink cooperative transmission scheme with orthogonal beamforming based limited feedback, where the cooperative clusters of multiple users may overlap and per-cell codebooks are considered. To assist the central unit (CU) for scheduling users with guaranteed QoS and performing adaptive transmission, a method for each user to estimate its signal-to-noise-and-interference ratio is derived. Targeting to ensure the required QoS of multiple users, we propose a method to select the cooperative cluster at each user and provide a method to schedule users based on their service priorities and channel conditions at the CU, where the clusters are selected semidynamically. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme significantly increases the percentage of users with satisfactory QoS demands.