Efficient selective feedback design for multicell cooperative networks

Multicell cooperative processing (MCP) has been recognized as a promising technique for increasing the spectral efficiency of future wireless systems. Unfortunately, the provided benefits of MCP come at the cost of increased radio feedback and backhaul overhead; for downlink transmission in frequency-division duplexing (FDD) systems, users need to feed back their channel-state information (CSI) to the MCP scheduler, and user data need to be exchanged between all cooperating base stations (BSs) through the backhaul network. In the context of conventional noncooperative networks, it has been suggested that radio feedback load could be reduced by preventing users with low-quality channels from feeding back their CSI (concept of selective feedback), at the cost of a small fraction of the multiuser diversity gain. In this paper, we investigate the translation of this selective feedback concept to MCP systems. According to this technique, users with weak interference links are prevented from feeding back their full CSI to the MCP scheduler. Although efficient, this technique alone cannot mitigate the backhaul overhead related to routing user data possibly to several BSs. To overcome this condition, we propose two schemes: one scheme based on Media Access Control (MAC)-layer scheduling and the other scheme based on physical-layer precoding. These schemes, combined with feedback load reduction, allow for a substantial mitigation of the MCP overheads related to feedback and backhaul load. We analyze the improvements in terms of both user-to-BS feedback reduction and backhaul load reduction, and we show that this framework results in a good tradeoff between performance and overhead for multicell cooperative networks.