An Effective Antenna Allocation for CoMP Transmission in Dense Small Cell Networks

Despite that network capacity can increase with cell densification, interferences from adjacent cells may deteriorate the throughput of users close to cell edges. To alleviate this problem and to offer a service quality with no significant cell edge degradation, we propose a feasible coordinated multi-point (CoMP) transmission architecture from a new look on antenna allocation in dense small cell networks (DSN). The CoMP idea is based on a two-step mechanism; the first step partitions the entire service region into multiple areas, and the second step adjusts the number of active users for each area. We then develop an antenna allocation algorithm to enhance the cell-edge user throughput, making use of the spatial multiplexing (SM) gain, array gain and cooperative diversity gain. Simulation results show that applying SM to DSN plays a crucial role to enhance the user throughput. And one of our proposed cooperative schemes is shown to have a great potential to improve the throughput for a large portion of users or the cell service area.