Joint Scheduling and Dynamic Clustering in Downlink Cellular Networks

We consider multiple base station (BS) cooperative transmission in downlink cellular networks to improve the spectral efficiency and the system capacity. Grouping BSs into clusters is a practical solution to realize BSs cooperation and reduce system complexity. However, it still suffers from inter-cluster interference, especially for the cluster-edge users. In this paper, clustering and scheduling are jointly considered to deal with the problem. The clusters are formed dynamically from users' point of view to minimize the inter-cluster interference, and are allowed to be overlapped. Accordingly, coordinated precoding scheme is designed to manage the intra-cluster interference. A greedy scheduling algorithm is proposed jointly with dynamic clustering. Simulations show that the proposed joint algorithm provides impressive average throughput gain over the non-joint ones, and the user fairness is improved significantly.