Cooperative MIMO multicell networks

Recently, the pressing desire to provide cost-effective solutions aimed at supporting high-throughput broadband wireless access with large-scale coverage has significantly changed the notion of the traditional cellular systems. Physical layer cooperation serves as an enabling technology for such a change. In latest cellular networks, neighboring infrastructure stations, such as base stations (BSs) or relay stations (RSs), share their communication resources to create virtual multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems by means of distributed transmission and signal processing. Cooperative processing at the BSs promises to exceed the limits on spectral efficiency imposed by inter-cell interference, thereby allowing ever more aggressive frequency reuse patterns. On the other hand, cooperation between BSs and RSs, as well as among RSs, is expected to extend coverage and capacity of point-to-multipoint links between BSs and mobile stations in a highly economical fashion. However, to achieve such benefits in practice, numerous research challenges have to be still tackled. This special issue has come up with the intention of collecting cutting-edge research achievements in cooperative MIMO multicell systems. For this special issue, we have received 35 manuscript submissions altogether. After a careful review process, 10 papers have been accepted for publication, which cover the following topics for cooperative MIMO multicell networks: channel modeling, power control and scheduling, interference management, protocol design and performance analysis, cost deployment, simulation tools and testbeds. A brief introduction of all the accepted papers is reported in the following.