Multi-cell linear precoding design for throughput optimization with imperfect CSI and outage

Cooperative multi-cell MIMO techniques are well known for their outstanding capability to mitigate inter-cell interference by allowing user data to be jointly processed by several interfering base stations for the improvement of the system performance. This paper proposes an iterative algorithm that designs the precoding matrix for cooperative multi-cell MIMO downlink communications. As the demand for higher throughput and higher system resilience is envisioned for future wireless communication systems, the proposed algorithm takes the potential outage into consideration when channel state information is only partially available at the transmitter side. The aim is to maximize the sum user throughput considering outage with subject to power limitation at each base station. The joint optimization of the precoding matrix and the assigned transmission rate is solved via a 2-step alternating algorithm. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated by Monte Carlo simulations and compared with existing methods. Simulation results show that our proposed algorithm achieves performance gain than other referenced methods over the entire compared SNR region. Performance of all methods are also compared and analyzed when inter-cluster interference is present.