An Optimized CoMP Transmission for a Heterogeneous Network Using eICIC Approach

Heterogeneous networks deployment is one of the most promising approaches to face the expected increase of the requested communication capacity. The concept is that of increasing the cells number while reducing their size in order to provide different layers of coverage. This paper proposes a coordinated method to face the inter and intra layer interference caused by the overlapping of heterogeneous cells. The aim is to exploit the benefits of both the enhanced InterCell Interference Coordination (eICIC) and Coordinated MultiPoint (CoMP) approaches and to limit at the same time their drawbacks by means of their optimized joint use. The idea devised here is to build an ad-hoc CoMP system on the top of a basic eICIC mechanism. The problem is the dynamic selection of the users and the cells that are involved in CoMP operations, with the goal of minimizing the unfulfilled data rate requests. Due to the computational complexity of the optimal solution, we propose a heuristic procedure and validate its accuracy by providing a comparison with the optimal numerical solution. In particular, our results show that the proposed method outperforms other benchmark solutions in terms of unfulfilled data rate requests and signaling overhead.