TARC: Throughput-Aware Random Scalable Clustering for Network MIMO

Current one-to-one wireless communications is reaching the Shannon limit. Previous works have studied space multiplexing schemes, e.g., superposition coding and successive interference cancellation, to overcome the limitation. In this paper, we focus on a network multiple-input multiple- output (MIMO) architecture, which is one such space multiplexing scheme, where multiple access points in the network MIMO system cooperate with each other to improve wireless communications capacity. However, channel sounding overhead for estimating the channel state information of every path between multiple access points and multiple clients is a significant problem. Likewise, the computational overhead for deciding which paths to use for the network MIMO transmission is also high. We propose Throughput-Aware Random Clustering (TARC) of access points to reduce the network MIMO overhead. TARC takes a cross-layer approach for choosing access points to participate in network MIMO transmission on the physical layer based on throughput in the data link layer. From our validation using simulations, we show that the proposed method is able to achieve approximately 2.5 times higher throughput than using all access points in the network and 1.4 times better throughput than adopting static cluster sizes.