System-level performance of coordinated multi-point transmission for heterogeneous networks in LTE-Advanced systems

The 3-th Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) has recently been investigating heterogeneous network (HetNet) deployments to improve the system throughput However, it is a great challenge to coordinate the transmission of each node in the HetNet scenario to increase the spectral efficiency. In this paper, we investigate the system-level performance of coordinated multi-point transmission for HetNets in LTE-A systems. We focus on the coordinated multi-point transmission between the Macro base station (Macro BS) and the low-power node, the low-power node can either shares the same cell ID with the Macro BS or have a separate cell ID. We evaluate the cell average and cell edge user´s performance of those two HetNet scenarios on our system-level simulation platform. Moreover, we also apply a power consumption model to evaluate the energy efficiency.