Practical considerations in cluster design for Co-ordinated Multipoint (CoMP) systems

Even though wireless standards are promising ever-higher data rates with the advancement from 3G to Wimax, LTE and LTE-A, the practical data rates hit a limit because of inter-cell interference. Many techniques have been proposed for inter-cell interference mitigation, and they offer different tradeoffs in complexity, performance and channel estimation and inter-BS communication overheads. We focus on the class of joint precoding schemes which need Channel State Information (CSI) at the transmitter. For such schemes, we study how the choice of the size and shape of the co-operating cluster affects the performance of the system.