A Novel Frequency Reuse Scheme for Coordinated Multi-Point Transmission

Coordinated Multi-Point (CoMP) transmission is considered in 3GPP LTE-Advanced as a key technique to improve the cell-edge performance. In order to support joint resource allocation among coordinate cells in CoMP systems, efficient frequency reuse schemes need to be designed. However, most of the existing frequency reuse schemes are not suitable for CoMP transmission due to not considering multi-cell joint transmission scenario in their frequency reuse rule. To solve this problem, a cooperative frequency reuse (CFR) scheme is proposed in this paper, which divides the cell-edge area of each cell into two types of zones, and defines a frequency reuse rule to support CoMP transmission for users in these zones. Compared with the conventional soft frequency reuse (SFR) scheme, simulation results demonstrate that the CFR scheme reduces the blocking probability by more than 50%, and improves the cell-edge throughput by 30~40%, with 5~9% additional cell-average throughput.