Radio access virtualization: Cell follows user

Virtual radio access (VRA) technology wherein groups of cooperative transmit points (TPs) form virtual TPs (VTPs) to serve user equipments (UEs) continue to be a thriving subject of research in future generations of wireless networks. In this paper, we propose a technique that uses UE-centric metrics to provide multiple partitions of a wireless network into VTP sets. Our technique guarantees that all UEs enjoy a required gain in at least one VTP; effectively eliminating the edge UE experience in the network. To further enhance the performance of the proposed VRA technique in practical scenarios wherein there is a large load imbalance in the network, we also introduce a new concept of soft UE-TP association in which each UE is partially associated with multiple TPs. The use of our soft association concept when forming VTP sets facilitates load-balancing among various TPs. Finally, a technique is also offered to select the best VTP set at each scheduling resource unit. Numerical simulations are used to demonstrate the performance of our virtualization techniques.