A Decentralized Clustering Scheme for Dynamic Downlink Base Station Cooperation

Base station (BS) cooperation is a promising technique to suppress co-channel interference for cellular networks. However, practical limitations constrain the scale of cooperation, thus the network is divided into small disjoint BS cooperation groups, namely clusters. A decentralized scheme for BS cluster formation is proposed based on efficient BS negotiations, of which the feedback overhead per user is nearly irrelevant to the network size, and the number of iteration rounds scales very slowly with the network size. Simulations show that our decentralized scheme provides significant sum-rate gain over static clustering and performs almost the same as the existing centralized approach. The proposed scheme is well suited for large-scale cellular networks due to its low overhead and complexity. key words: interference mitigation, base station cooperation, decentralized algorithms