Clustering Approach in Coordinated Multi-Point Transmission/Reception System

Multi-cell cooperation has been regarded as a promising technique of the future cellular wireless network to achieve higher transmission rate and better QoS (quality of service) performance. Cooperation among base stations can be classified into two categories: centralized and distributed cooperation. In this work, we mainly consider efficient and practical cooperation clustering approaches in the downlink Coordinated Multi-Point (CoMP) system. A novel Multi-Layered clustering method is proposed for distributed cooperation, which is able to make a significant enhancement with limited overhead increment compared with traditional static clustering. We also develop a new concept for centralized cooperation. Simulation results are presented under the block diagonal precoding algorithm.