Performance Evaluation of Uplink Base Station Cooperation in Multi-Cell MIMO Systems

In this paper, the throughput performance of uplink Base Station (BS) cooperation in a realistic multi-cell MIMO system is evaluated. We choose LTE Release 8 as our baseline, and propose a whole implementation scheme for uplink BS cooperation. First we propose a dynamic cooperative BS selection algorithm, in which each cell-edge user will be assigned a potential cooperative BS by comparing the reception powers between its home BS and neighbor interference BSs. Next, an efficient multi-cell scheduling algorithm is proposed to explore the system throughput gain with low complexity. Finally, since scheduling results can be shared between different cells, we can use this information to recalculate each sector's Signal to Interference plus Noise Ratio so that more accurate Modulation and Coding Scheme can be set for each UE. System level simulation results show that the great performance gain that uplink Base Station cooperation can achieve. Moreover, the impacts of multiuser MIMO and power control are analyzed.