Dynamic cell clustering for CoMP in LTE-A and its calibrated system level performance evaluation

With the rapid growing demand on high data-rate and high-quality wireless services, a large dimension of multicell cooperative transmission has shown prosperous in next generation wireless communication systems including long-term evolution (LTE) and its advanced (LTE-A). Effective investigations on multicell cooperation extraordinarily rely on the availability of a system level simulator. In this work, we first present fundamental instructions on constructing a system level simulator for LTE. The calibration outputs of our simulator show its effectiveness and consistency with widely-acknowledged standard requirements. Then, the simulator is further enhanced for supporting multicell cooperation, i.e., coordinated multi-point transmission (CoMP) in LTE/LTE-A. With the enhanced calibrated simulator, we propose a dynamic cooperating cell clustering strategy for suppressing the inter-cell interference (ICI) while maintaining low cooperating overhead. System level performance evaluated by our simulator shows that the dynamic clustering outperforms existing approaches in terms of both large scale cell average throughput and cell-edge user performance.