Modelling the impact of downlink CoMP in a realistic scenario

Coordinated multi-point transmission/reception (CoMP) enables the communication between different base stations, which can improve the cell edge user performance as well as the system capacity. So far, the most studies focused on evaluating the performance of CoMP in regular scenarios with uniform traffic. Since these scenarios differ substantially from realistic conditions, it is doubtful whether the performance results obtained in these studies can be applied to real-word scenarios. That is why in this work we evaluate the performance of various CoMP methods for a European city. As we use the existing network topology, employing a high resolution ray-tracing path loss prediction and adopting a traffic map from live 3G network, we examine a highly realistic scenario. The results show moderate overall capacity gains but large reduction in network outage of advanced data services.