Editorial
Cooperative MIMO multicell networks
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* Corresponding author: Francesco Verde f.verde@unina.it
1 Department of Biomedical, Electronic and Telecommunication Engineering (DIBET), University of Naples Federico II, Naples, Italy
2 Department of Electrical Engineering, Institute of Communications Engineering, National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, Taiwan
3 Bell Labs, Alcatel-Lucent, Holmdel, NJ, USA
4 Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
5 Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL), Cambridge, MA, USA
EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing 2012, 2012:41 doi:10.1186/1687-6180-2012-41
Published: 22 February 2012First paragraph (this article has no abstract)
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.
