Channel Norm-Based User Scheduling Exploiting Channel Asymmetry in Base Station Cooperative Transmission Systems

Base station cooperative transmission, which is also known as coordinated multi-point (CoMP) transmission, is a promising technique to improve spectrum efficiency in future cellular systems. However, they need large signalling overhead to gather the channel information. In this paper, we consider low feedback user scheduling in downlink coherent CoMP systems exploiting their inherent channel asymmetry. Through the analysis of the statistics of the angle between channel vectors and the tightness of a lower bound of the orthogonally projected norm, we show that channel norm provides sufficient information to judge the orthogonality among users in asymmetric channels. Based on this observation, we propose a channel norm-based user scheduler (NUS), a local channel aided NUS (LocalNUS) and a large-scale fading-based user scheduler (LUS). Simulation results show that the LocalNUS performs very close to the existing greedy user scheduler (GUS) and semi-orthogonal user scheduler (SUS) with full channel state information but requiring much lower feedback overhead, the NUS performs close to or even outperforms the GUS and the SUS when limited feedback is considered, and the LUS is robust to time-varying channels.