Coordinated multi-point (CoMP) communication is attractive for heterogeneous cellular networks (HCNs) for interference reduction. However, previous approaches to CoMP face two major hurdles in HCNs. First, they usually ignore the inter-cell overhead messaging delay, although it results in an irreducible performance bound. Second, they consider the grid or Wyner model for base station locations, which is not appropriate for HCN BS locations which are numerous and haphazard. Even for conventional macrocell networks without overlaid small cells, SINR results are not tractable in the grid model nor accurate in the Wyner model. To overcome these hurdles, we develop a novel analytical framework which includes the impact of overhead delay for CoMP evaluation in HCNs. This framework can be used for a class of CoMP schemes without user data sharing. As an example, we apply it to downlink CoMP zero-forcing beamforming (ZFBF), and see significant divergence from previous work. For example, we show that CoMP ZFBF does not increase throughput when the overhead channel delay is larger than 60% of the channel coherence time. We also find that, in most cases, coordinating with only one other cell is nearly optimum for downlink CoMP ZFBF. Index Terms-Heterogeneous cellular networks, downlink coordinated multi-point transmission, interference management, stochastic geometry.
The impact of the overhead delay introduced by CoMP transmission on the performance of HetNets was studied in REF .
Downlink Coordinated Multi-Point with Overhead Modeling in Heterogeneous Cellular Networks
IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications
IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications
Mathematics Computer Science