Method of combined user and coordination pattern scheduling over varying antenna and base-station coordination patterns in a multi-cell environment

摘要

A method and system is disclosed herein for scheduling in a multi-cell environment. In one embodiment, the system comprises a plurality of user terminals; a plurality of base stations to communicate with the plurality of user terminals, wherein the plurality of antennas from the base stations are grouped into coordination patterns that specify which antennas operate together as a cluster to coordinate transmissions with a subset of the plurality of user terminals, and further wherein defined pairs of the antenna sets and associated user sets vary over transmission resources based on coordination pattern changes such that different sets of antennas in the plurality of antennas are grouped together on different resources to coordinate transmissions to different subsets of users; and at least one controller to execute at least one scheduling algorithm to schedule transmissions with user terminals by specifying which user terminal to schedule for service by which sets of antennas and on which transmission resource and with what transmission rate.