JSDM and multi-cell networks: Handling inter-cell interference through long-term antenna statistics

Joint Spatial Division and Multiplexing (JSDM) is a novel paradigm for splitting the functions of multiuser MIMO precoding into a concatenation of blocks: a pre-beamforming projection depending only on the channel covariances, and a precoder achieving multiplexing gain over the effective channel including pre-beamforming. In this paper, we extend our study of JSDM to a multi-cell system, where the pre-beamforming projections are jointly selected across cells together with user scheduling, such that inter-cell interference can be handled using only the channel covariances (the so-called “long-term” antenna statistics), which are much easier to collect than the classical instantaneous channel state information.