Centralized resource coordination scheme for Inter-enB CoMP with non-ideal backhaul

In 3GPP LTE-Advanced Release 11, coordinated multi-point transmission and reception (CoMP) which applies interference coordination between base stations (or eNBs) was introduced to improve cell-edge performance of the network and specified under the assumption that ideal backhaul is deployed. However, in practice, network operators may have non-ideal backhaul, especially between macro eNB and small eNB, which may result in limited CoMP gain. Hence, in this paper, a centralized coordination scheme based on two-step processing which can reduce backhaul delay impact on CoMP is introduced. In the first step of the centralized coordination scheme, the central coordinator decides and forwards resource allocation of the cells in coordination area. In the second step, each eNB conducts user scheduling on the resources allocated to each of its cells and applies link adaptation to meet the link performance requirement for the interference condition according to the resource allocation result. Simulation results show that the coordination based on two-step processing outperforms other coordinated scheduling schemes and maintains CoMP gain even in non-ideal backhaul.