Energy efficiency of CoMP-based cellular networks with guaranteed coverage

Due to the cooperation diversity, Coordinated MultiPoint (CoMP) transmission may potentially improve energy efficiency of cellular networks. The main purpose of this paper is to analyze this potential. By employing CoMP, there are two schemes to improve energy efficiency; one is to decrease the transmission power of base stations (CDTP) without changing cells´ size and re-deploying base stations (BSs); another one is to reduce the number of BSs by increasing coverage area (CICA). In this paper, the coverage gain brought by CoMP technology given the guaranteed coverage ratio performance is firstly performed. Based on that, the energy efficiency gain of CDTP and CICA is investigated. It showed that comparing to the scheme of CDTP which is nearly no potential to improve energy efficiency, CICA can improve energy efficiency by more than 15%. This result could provide references for operators when carrying out new cellular deployments.