Spatial resources optimization in distributed MIMO networks with limited data sharing

Wireless access through a large distributed network of low-complexity infrastructure nodes empowered with cooperation and coordination capabilities, is an emerging radio architecture, candidate to deal with the mobile data capacity crunch. In the 3GPP evolutionary path, this is known as the Cloud-RAN paradigm for future radio. In such a complex network, distributed MIMO resources optimization is of paramount importance, in order to achieve capacity scaling. In this paper, we investigate efficient strategies towards optimizing the pairing of access nodes with users as well as linear precoding designs for providing fair QoS experience across the whole network, when data sharing is limited due to complexity and overhead constraints. We propose a method for obtaining a spatial resources allocation optimization solution which can be applied in networks of limited scale, as well as an approximation algorithm with bounded polynomial complexity which can be used in larger networks. The particular algorithm outperforms existing user-oriented clustering techniques and achieves quite high quality-of-service levels with reasonable complexity.