A novel coordinated scheduling algorithm for uplink CoMP systems

As a key technology adopted by LTE-A, coordinated multipoint (CoMP) transmission and reception differs from other conventional techniques in the exploitation of inter-cell interference (ICI) to improve spectral efficiency, especially at the cell-edge. While most of previous studies concentrate on downlink CoMP aspects, this paper deals with the coordinated scheduling in uplink CoMP. A scheduling metric based on nullspace projection and average throughput is created to support the proposed coordinated scheduling algorithm. The novel approach is compared with conventional coordinated scheduling strategies in terms of sum rate, fairness, and complexity. Extensive systemlevel simulation shows that the proposed scheme achieves a better tradeoff between system capacity and throughput fairness while reducing the performance-complexity significantly.