Pérez-Adán, DarianGonzález-Coma, José P.López-Martínez, F.J.Castedo, Luis2026-06-112026-06-112025-05D. Pérez-Adán, J. P. González-Coma, F. Javier López-Martínez and L. Castedo, "Interference-Aware Precoding and User Selection for Multi-Cell Near-Field XL-MIMO Systems," in IEEE Wireless Communications Letters, vol. 14, no. 5, pp. 1396-1400, May 2025, doi: 10.1109/LWC.2025.35433482162-2345https://hdl.handle.net/2183/48562© 2025 IEEE. This version of the article has been accepted for publication, after peer review. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. The Version of Record is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1109/LWC.2025.3543348[Abstract]: We address the problem of user allocation in the downlink of a multi-user multi-cell communication system where extra-large multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) base stations (BSs) operate under SW (spherical wavefront) propagation. We propose a novel scheduling strategy that categorizes users based on their impact on both the inter-user-interference (IUI) within each cell and the inter-cell-interference (ICI) across the system. This approach efficiently manages the overall system interference while significantly reducing computational overhead. The results show that the proposed solution outperforms baseline zero-forcing beamforming methods and state-of-the-art SW-aware strategies that disregard ICI, allowing for an over 30% improvement in terms of sum-rate.engCopyright © 2025, IEEEMulti-cellDLSchedulingSWXL-MIMOjournal articleopen access10.1109/LWC.2025.3543348