Distributed CoMP transmission for cell range expansion with almost blank subframe in downlink heterogeneous networks

The almost blank subframe (ABS) has been studied in 3GPP as a way to mitigate downlink interference experienced by cell range expansion (CRE) user equipments (UEs). However, the throughput of CRE UEs highly depends on the ratios of ABS which are statically configured in many situations. The coordinated multi-point (CoMP) is one of the key solutions standardized in LTE-A which can be implemented in CRE with ABS to exploit the abundant spatial resources. And distributed cell selection could help guarantee the UEs' performance under different range expansion biases. In this paper, a distributed CoMP method for CRE with ABS is proposed in heterogeneous networks. Simulation results show that our proposed algorithm provides considerable performance gains in the spectrum efficiency with different bias and users settings.