A cross-cell coordination scheme in multi-carrier MF-HSDPA network

Multi-point transmission has been paid attention in the evolution of multi-carrier HSPA⁺ networks because of its capability to deal with the negative channel conditions. Multipoint coordination is a key issue to be investigated in this area. In the existing deployment, the multi-point transmission is only applied in a non-coordinated way in the current multi-carrier Multi-flow HSDPA (MF-HSDPA) network. Besides, the metric measuring the quality of multi-point transmission is limited. In this paper, we propose a cross-cell coordination scheme which considers both the maximization of sum-rate and the minimization of packet sum-delay in multi-carrier MF-HSDPA network. The proposed scheme involves the cooperation of the cross-cell scheduling and power optimization. The cross-cell scheduling can be further divided into the intra-cell and inter-cell processes. Then, we propose a heuristic method based on the theory of flow network to solve the whole scheduling issue with a reasonable tradeoff between the performance and complexity. Simulation results will show the advantages of our proposed scheme.