User Scheduling for Cooperative Base Station Transmission Exploiting Channel Asymmetry

We study low-signalling overhead scheduling for downlink coordinated multi-point (CoMP) transmission with multi-antenna base stations (BSs) and single-antenna users. By exploiting the asymmetric channel feature, i.e., the pathloss differences towards different BSs, we derive a metric to judge orthogonality among users only using their average channel gains, based on which we propose a semi-orthogonal scheduler that can be applied in a two-stage transmission strategy. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheduler performs close to the semi-orthogonal scheduler with full channel information, especially when each BS is with more antennas and the celledge region is large. Compared with other overhead reduction strategies, the proposed scheduler requires much less training overhead to achieve the same cell-average data rate.