User-selective collaboration maximizing gain in sum rate

Network MIMO is a technology being developed towards lifting the interference limits on wireless network through collaborative transmissions from multiple base stations. However its great potential is shadowed by the stringent requirement of high speed/capacity backbones facilitating information exchange, including data, control signals, and channel state information amongst the base stations. In this paper, we propose a user-selective collaboration scheme to mitigate the backbone requirement by reducing the information exchange required. We define a certain threshold for users in each base station and only those users exceeding the threshold will be served by multiple base stations collaboratively. The other users will be served by a single base station as in a conventional non-collaborative transmission. The threshold is determined in such a way that the users with collaborative transmissions enjoy maximized sum rates whereas the others without collaborative transmissions sacrifice only marginal potential collaboration gain in terms of achievable maximized sum rates. As the amount of information to be exchanged will be a square function of the number of users served by the collaborative base stations, the user-selective scheme can reduce the backhaul overhead significantly.