Opportunistic Scheduling Algorithm for Joint-Processing DL CoMP

Coordinated Multi-Point (CoMP) transmission aims to improve the quality of service of User Equipments (UEs) at cell-edge. To achieve this, some Joint-Processing (JP) CoMP categories use more spectrum resources and thus reduce the spectrum resource for non-CoMP UEs. From the point of view of user experience, it is inappropriate that UEs which cannot benefit from CoMP or legacy UEs are penalized (by undergoing lower data rate) when CoMP feature is enabled. In this paper, this degradation is highlighted by the Scheduling Transfer Function that allows to assess the impact on the throughput of a given UE when one technical feature (as CoMP) is enabled. Based on an opportunistic approach, an efficient scheduling scheme perfectly usable for all the JP categories is proposed. System simulation results show firstly, that the proposed scheme can maintain the legacy UEs performance whether CoMP feature is enabled or not, and secondly, that the combined use of Coherent Joint Transmission (JT) and Dynamic Point Selection (DPS) without muting allows an efficient adaption to variable user densities regions of the network.