Adaptive downlink CoMP in heterogeneous cellular networks with imperfect overhead messaging

Coordinated multi-point (CoMP) transmission is an effective means of improving network throughput in heterogeneous cellular networks (HetNets). However, its performance is seriously weakened if imperfect coordination happens between base stations (BSs). Many prior CoMP works do not consider inter-cell overhead message delays such that a seemingly astonishing CoMP throughput gain is attained. In this paper, the quantization error and delay that actually exist in overhead messages was modeled and we developed a much tractable SIR model based on the stochastic geometry framework. We proposed adaptive CoMP that is applied to downlink zero-forcing beamforming (ZFBF) and it can mitigate the interference from the coordinated cells with delayed overhead messages. The bounds on the complementary cumulative distribution function (CCDF) of the SIR of a user are characterized such that the average throughput of a user is able to be analytically evaluated. Numerical results show that the proposed adaptive CoMP scheme can make the throughput gain very robust to the overhead delay and thus significantly increase the throughput even when BSs are not perfectly coordinated.