  We consider a cellular network with multi-antenna base stations (BSs) and
single-antenna users, multicell cooperation, imperfect channel state
information, and directional antennas each with a vertically adjustable beam.
We investigate the impact of the elevation angle of the BS antenna pattern,
denoted as tilt, on the performance of the considered network when employing
either a conventional single-cell transmission or a fully cooperative multicell
transmission. Using the results of this investigation, we propose a novel
hybrid multicell cooperation technique in which the intercell interference is
controlled via either cooperative beamforming in the horizontal plane or
coordinated beamfroming in the vertical plane of the wireless channel, denoted
as adaptive multicell 3D beamforming. The main idea is to divide the coverage
area into two disjoint vertical regions and adapt the multicell cooperation
strategy at the BSs when serving each region. A fair scheduler is used to share
the time-slots between the vertical regions. It is shown that the proposed
technique can achieve performance comparable to that of a fully cooperative
transmission but with a significantly lower complexity and signaling
requirements. To make the performance analysis computationally efficient,
analytical expressions for the user ergodic rates under different beamforming
strategies are also derived.
