Particle Swarm Optimization for Antenna Port Placement in Coordinated Multi-Point Systems

Abstract

Coordinated Multi-Point (CoMP), also termed Distributed Antenna System (DAS), has emerged in recent years in the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Long Term Evolution (LTE) as a promising architecture to enhance the link performance and, consequently, the capacity of wireless communication systems. A CoMP system consists of several Antenna Ports (APs) geographically spread over a coverage area and connected through a fast backhaul to an Enhanced Node B (eNB). The optimal placement of a number of distributed APs depends, e.g., on the distribution of the User Equipments (UEs) and the metric to be optimized and, in some cases, cannot be determined analytically. In order to solve the AP placement problem, global optimization techniques can be employed, as it is the case of the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) technique used in this work considering various scenarios with different number of APs, UE distributions, and optimization metrics. The obtained results shown that PSO can be a very suitable tool effectively for the planning of CoMP systems.