Dynamic cell clustering design for realistic coordinated multipoint downlink transmission

Coordinated multipoint (CoMP) transmission is capable of significantly improving both the cell average and cell-edge performance in terms of spectral efficiency (SE). It is therefore regarded as a key enabling technique in the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Long Term Evolution (LTE)-Advanced. Early research mainly concentrates on coordinated transmissions from several eNBs. Recently, coordination schemes of a large number of eNBs have been proposed within the 3GPP frame for the sake of reaping enhanced performance gain. In this paper, we investigate the performance of CoMP downlink system upon considering appropriate channel state information (CSI) error models in order to simulate system in the realistic setting. Specifically, dynamic cell clustering schemes are proposed in order to improve the system performance, while limiting the system computational complexity. Both theoretical analysis and system level simulation (SLS) results are provided to show that the performance of the conventional fixed cluster pattern may encounter significant degradation in the presence of imperfect CSI. By contrast, our proposed dynamic cell clustering scheme is capable of outperforming the conventional fixed clustering counterpart, due to its capability of adapting user distribution for sum capacity enhancement.