Efficient user selection for multi-cell multi-user MIMO systems with limited backhaul

Multi-cell multi-user multiple-input multiple-output （MC-MU-MIMO） is a promising technique to eliminate inter-user interference and inter-cell cochannel interference in wireless telecommunication systems. As the large number of users in the system and the limited number of simultaneously supportable users with MC-MU-MIMO, it is necessary to select a subset of users to maximize the total throughput. However, the fully centralized user selection algorithms used in single cell system, which will incur high complexity and backhaul load in multi-cell cooperative processing （MCP） systems, are not suitable to MC-MU-MIMO systems. This article presents a two cascaded user selection method for MCP systems with multi-cell block diagonalization. In this paper, a local optimal subset of users, which can maximize the local sum capacity, is first chosen by the greedy method in every cooperative base station in parallel. Then, all the cooperative base stations report their local optimal users to the central unit （CU）. Finally, the global optimal users, which can maximize the global sum capacity of MCP systems, are selected from the aggregated local optimal users at the CU. The simulation results show that the proposed method performs closely to the optimal and centralized algorithm. Meanwhile, the complexity and backhaul load are reduced dramatically.