Investigation on energy efficiency in HetNet CoMP architecture

The increasing energy consumption driven by striking growths in the number of users and data usage turns out the focal point for mobile operators in fulfilling requirements on cost reduction and environmental impact targets. As a step towards incorporating more energy friendly mobile platforms in future networks, 3GPP LTE-Advanced has adopted coordinated multipoint (CoMP) transmission/reception due to its ability to mitigate and/or coordinate inter-cell interference (ICI). The major CoMP techniques which already existed are joint transmission (JT) and coordinated scheduling/ beamforming (CS/CB). In this paper we propose a novel energy-efficient design (NEED) for heterogeneous network (HetNet) CoMP architecture composing both JT and CS/CB which provides a realistic trade-off for green wireless networks. A feedback based ICI coordination scheme is investigated in terms of different performance metrics (throughput; cell average and cell-edge energy efficiency; radio signaling and backhaul overhead comparison; and power consumption ratio) which eventually helps to reach a decision in favor of the proposed architecture in terms of performance trade-off.