Centralized Dynamic Point Blanking in LTE-Advanced Network for Inter-Cell Interference Mitigation

Dynamic Point Blanking (DPB) is a Coordinated MultiPoint (CoMP) technology that has attracted significant interest for inter-cell interference mitigation in wireless communication systems due to its potential performance gain, robustness and relatively low complexity. This paper describes the principle of CoMP DPB as well as the standardized support that exists for it in Long-Term Evolution Advanced (LTE-A) Releases 11 and 12, especially for centralized CoMP DPB; unified formulas and solutions are provided for the optimization problems in centralized CoMP DPB, together with corresponding evaluation results. According to these system-level evaluation results, it can be concluded that CoMP DPB can provide a clear performance gain in heterogeneous networks, is not sensitive to backhaul delay and has the potential to be used for both single-vendor and multi-vendor CoMP deployments.