Network coordinated opportunistic beamforming in downlink cellular networks

We propose a network coordinated opportunistic beamforming (NC-OBF) protocol for downlink K-cell networks with M-antenna base stations (BSs). In the NC-OBF scheme, based on pseudo-randomly generated BF vectors, a user scheduling strategy is introduced, where each BS opportunistically selects a set of mobile stations (MSs) whose desired signals generate the minimum interference to the other MSs. Its performance is then analyzed in terms of degrees-of-freedom (DoFs). As our achievability result, it is shown that KM DoFs are achievable if the number N of MSs in a cell scales at least as SNR^KM-1, where SNR denotes the received signal-to-noise ratio. Furthermore, by deriving the corresponding upper bound on the DoFs, it is shown that the NC-OBF scheme is DoFoptimal. Note that the proposed scheme does not require the global channel state information and dimension expansion, thereby resulting in easier implementation.