A queue-aware scheduling scheme for multi-cell coordination systems

The scheduling problem in downlink of the cooperative multi-cell system with random packet arrivals is investigated in this paper. On the one hand, multi-cell cooperative processing (MCP) has the potential to boost spectral efficiency and improve fairness. However, the traditional centralized multi-cell cooperative scheme, in which a central processing unit is assumed with the global knowledge of all the required downlink channels and user messages to jointly design the transmitted signals for all BSs, incurs significant overhead and complexity, and will hinder the practical implementation of MCP. On the other hand, in case of the random packets arrivals, the relevant fairness criterion will be the stabilization of all buffer queues which guarantees a bounded average delay for all users. In this paper, we adopt the decentralized cooperative scheme with adaptive linear preprocessing transmission. A queue-aware scheduling scheme is considered which maximizing the queue-length-weighted sum of the users' rates. The performance of proposed scheme is evaluated through the computer simulation. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can achieve better tradeoff between system throughput and fairness among users.