Implementation issues of the partial CoMP concept

Cooperative multi point transmission (CoMP) is the topic of different investigations regarding LTE-advanced networks to fulfill future capacity requirements by mitigating inter cell interference. If joint transmission is performed by several sectors to their assigned UEs, the interference within this cooperation area (CA) is suppressed completely, but still existent between different CAs. An user centric assignment counters that inter CA interference, but is hard to realize because of the low probability to find a group of UEs with an identical set of strongest sectors. The so called `partial CoMP´ (pCoMP) framework circumvents this limitation and is presented in this article with focus on intra CA interference. Dependencies between different parameters of pCoMP and the resulting intra CA interference show a trade off between needed system resources and remaining interference. System level simulations regarding intra and inter CA interference yield gains similar to scenarios using user centric assignment, but with a penetration rate of more than 90% of all users.