  The throughput of multicell systems is inherently limited by interference and
the available communication resources. Coordinated resource allocation is the
key to efficient performance, but the demand on backhaul signaling and
computational resources grows rapidly with number of cells, terminals, and
subcarriers. To handle this, we propose a novel multicell framework with
dynamic cooperation clusters where each terminal is jointly served by a small
set of base stations. Each base station coordinates interference to neighboring
terminals only, thus limiting backhaul signalling and making the framework
scalable. This framework can describe anything from interference channels to
ideal joint multicell transmission.
  The resource allocation (i.e., precoding and scheduling) is formulated as an
optimization problem (P1) with performance described by arbitrary monotonic
functions of the signal-to-interference-and-noise ratios (SINRs) and arbitrary
linear power constraints. Although (P1) is non-convex and difficult to solve
optimally, we are able to prove: 1) Optimality of single-stream beamforming; 2)
Conditions for full power usage; and 3) A precoding parametrization based on a
few parameters between zero and one. These optimality properties are used to
propose low-complexity strategies: both a centralized scheme and a distributed
version that only requires local channel knowledge and processing. We evaluate
the performance on measured multicell channels and observe that the proposed
strategies achieve close-to-optimal performance among centralized and
distributed solutions, respectively. In addition, we show that multicell
interference coordination can give substantial improvements in sum performance,
but that joint transmission is very sensitive to synchronization errors and
that some terminals can experience performance degradations.
