Adaptive and Distributed CoMP Scheduling in LTE-Advanced Systems

Coordinated Multi-Point (CoMP) transmission and reception is one of the most promising technologies introduced in 3GPP Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-Advanced) standard. Especially targeting the User Equipments (UEs) in the celledge region, CoMP technology improves the edge throughput and reliability in two ways: Joint Transmission (JT) and Coordinated Scheduling/Beamforming (CS/CB). This paper proposes an adaptive and distributed CoMP scheduling algorithm which allocates the frequency band to each UE and could operate in either JT or CS/CB mode of CoMP. Our contributions include (a) proposing an algorithm resolving subband allocation, UE selection, and CoMP mode decision jointly; and (b) defining the message format exchanged among eNBs for cooperation. The performance of the proposed algorithm is comparatively evaluated along with that of other schemes such as non-coordination and frequency reuse schemes in terms of both average and outage throughput.