Capacity-Fairness Trade-Off Using Coordinated Multi-Cell Processing

Multi-cell processing, also called Coordinated Multiple Point (CoMP), is a promising distributed technique that uses neighbour cells´ antennas. It is expected to be the part of next generation cellular standards such as LTE-A. Small cell networks in dense urban environments are limited by interferences and CoMP can strongly take advantage of this fact to improve cell-edge users´ throughput. The present study introduces a distributed criterion for mobiles to select their optimal set of Base Stations (BS) to perform CoMP, and evaluates the impact of this association on the fairness and the total cell throughput. For that, we use a known theoretical expression for the capacity outage probability of CoMP under Rayleigh fading and evaluate the goodputs of antennas associations. The proposed criterion is used in combination with alpha-fair resource allocation to perform a joint double-objective optimization of fairness and efficiency.