A clustered base transceiver station (BTS) coordination strategy is proposed for a large cellular MIMO network, which includes full intra-cluster coordination to enhance the sum rate and limited inter-cluster coordination to reduce interference for the cluster edge users. Multi-cell block diagonalization is used to coordinate the transmissions across multiple BTSs in the same cluster. To satisfy per-BTS power constraints, three combined precoder and power allocation algorithms are proposed with different performance and complexity tradeoffs. For inter-cluster coordination, the coordination area is chosen to balance fairness for edge users and the achievable sum rate. It is shown that a small cluster size (about 7 cells) is sufficient to obtain most of the sum rate benefits from clustered coordination while greatly relieving channel feedback requirement. Simulations show that the proposed coordination strategy efficiently reduces interference and provides a considerable sum rate gain for cellular MIMO networks.
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