A novel distributed cluster combination method for CoMP in LTE-A system

In LTE-A system, the coordinated multipoint transmission (CoMP) strategy is usually implemented among a group of base stations called coordination cluster. In this paper, in order to obtain a better balance between cell-edge UE performance promotion and overhead, a novel distributed coordination cluster combination method is proposed, in which the coordination cluster no longer keeps static but is dynamically combined by multiple sectors, an index called effective cell-edge UE number is used to quantify the performance of cluster combination, and a utility function based on collision strategy is employed to guarantee that the best combination decision is made. A revised joint proportional fairness scheduling method is also proposed to improve the frequency resource utilization. The system level simulation shows that the novel method outperforms Network-defined method, and very approximates to UE-specific method when maximum cluster size is set to 6. Meanwhile, its overhead and delay are both very low.