Two-phase scheduling and leakage-based precoding in wireless cellular networks

We consider the downlink of a wireless cellular network where the base stations are equipped with multiple antennas and operate in the same frequency band. Since scheduling changes the spatial transmit signal processing with each time slot, information from neighboring base stations is required for data encoding. This can, in theory, be accomplished by a high-capacity backhaul network through which the base stations exchange channel state information (CSI) and other control signals. In reality, however, the temporal granularity of the scheduler does not allow for timely distribution of CSI among base stations. We propose a two-phase scheduler which optimizes the precoding in the first phase and allows the users to feed back their instantaneous interference power in the second phase. For the single-user case, we present a practical scheme that combines two-phase scheduling with precoders that maximize the signal-to-leakage-plus-noise ratio. If the users feed back the interference power together with a supported rate, communication between base stations can be limited to integers. By comparing the performance to multi-user two-phase scheduling with dirty paper coding and to algorithms that share CSI among base stations we show that two-phase scheduling is a technically and practically feasible solution to deal with non-stationary intercell interference.