Clustering-based assignment within CoMP systems

Abstract

More and more Coordinated Multi-Point (CoMP) systems are attracting interest as a means to improve the performance of conventional cellular networks, particularly thanks to the joint processing approach. However, the large amount of signaling and computer operations required deserves special attention regarding both backhaul and radio resources constraints. Partitioning the set of transmission points into clusters is likely to reduce this coordination cost, but the search for the best formations of clusters may lead to expressive further computational efforts. Herein we introduce a novel approach, the Clustering-based Assignment Algorithm (CbAA), to cluster dynamically the transmission points on the downlink in order to transmit coherently to multiple users. When compared to static clustering, the proposed CbAA provided expressive gains in terms of system spectral efficiency. Compared to state-of-the-art dynamic clustering approaches, CbAA can waive the exhaustive search over all possible formations as well as the repetitive precoder calculations during the clustering procedure.