Investigation on Multi-Cell Sounding Reference Signal Coordination for TD-LTE-Advanced CoMP

Coordinated Multi-Point (CoMP) transmission is a key technology for LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) to increase the downlink cell-edge throughput. Generally speaking, multi-cell channel state information (CSI) is needed at multiple coordinated eNBs to achieve the performance gain promised by CoMP in downlink. Sounding reference signal (SRS) could be an efficient tool to enable multi-cell CSI acquisition for time division duplex (TDD) LTE-A (TD-LTE-A) systems because of the inherent channel reciprocity in TDD systems. In this study, we investigate multi-cell SRS coordination schemes for TD-LTE-A downlink CoMP. We introduce a CoMP-specific sounding zone that facilitates multi-cell SRS coordination and then propose and compare three coordinated SRS resource allocation schemes within the CoMP-specific sounding zone, i.e., cyclic shift (CS) coordination, comb coordination, and orthogonal cover code (OCC) for the SRS. Computer simulations show the effectiveness of multi-cell SRS coordination and its necessity is revealed by the sum-rate analysis of TD-LTE-A downlink CoMP.