Effective Service Architecture and Antenna Allocation Mechanism for CoMP Transmissions in Ultra Dense Networks

Abstract

A practical and effective service deployment method is proposed for coordinated multi-point (CoMP) transmissions in ultra-dense networks (UDN). Despite the potential of UDN for throughput enhancement, the throughput of edge users is still considerably deteriorated by interferences from adjacent cells. Applying the CoMP transmissions among cells appears to be a feasible solution to resolve this issue. However, the nature of the almost randomly deployed locations of small cell base stations (BSs) and their limited numbers of antennas make it difficult to design an effective resource coordination mechanism for the CoMP services in UDN. Reconsidering this problem from an antenna allocation viewpoint, we present a simple yet effective approach to improve the cell-edge throughput under a centralized radio access network architecture. The first step is to partition the entire service area into multiple subareas, and the second step is to allocate the antenna degrees of freedom to each subarea. To improve the scalability of this service method, a two-tier service deployment method is further introduced based on the BS clustering and service area partitioning of the entire network. The simulation results show that the proposed service architecture can provide a significant improvement on the cell-edge throughput while still maintaining a good average throughput in the UDN.