A novel static clustering approach for CoMP

Coordinated Multipoint (CoMP) transmission technique is gaining much attention in LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) as a solution to mitigate the inter-cell interference in order to significantly improve users (UEs) throughput, especially for those located at the cell edge. Several field trials on CoMP have shown that an important gain can be achieved with the cooperation between base stations at the cost of additional system overhead. A set of cooperative base stations in CoMP is called cluster, the performance of CoMP rely on how these clusters are made. Two main clustering methods are considered for CoMP, static and dynamic clustering. In this paper, we present a novel static clustering method based on 120 degree cell sectoring. Simulation results show that the proposed clustering scheme can achieve with limited signal overhead much better performance than the existing static clustering schemes with about 20% improvement of cell average SINR. Additionally, the results show that the proposed static clustering scheme can achieve close to the performance of the idealistic clustering scenario (UE-specific clustering).