Dynamic UE clustering for distributed MIMO cooperative transmission

Abstract

Multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) using a large number of spatially distributed antennas (DAs) is a promising technique to achieve high link capacity uniformly over a macro-cell area. To reduce the computational complexity of MU-MIMO processing, the UE clustering can be used. However, this produces the inter-cluster interference (ICI) and degrades the link capacity of a user equipment (UE) especially near the cluster boundary. In this paper, to solve the ICI problem, we propose a dynamic UE clustering in which UEs in a macro-cell area are grouped into non-overlapped UE cluster-sets and they are activated in a time-division manner. We evaluate, by computer simulation, the UE link capacity of OFDM downlink achievable by the use of the proposed dynamic UE clustering.