Optimized Joint Power and Resource Allocation for Coordinated Multi-point Transmission for Multi-user LTE-Advanced Systems

Abstract

Recent research has shown that coordinated multi-point (CoMP) transmission can provide significant gains in terms of the overall throughput of cellular systems. The main purpose of this paper is to enhance the overall cell throughput and to optimize the power consumption in LTE-Advanced systems using CoMP. In particular, we present joint resource allocation, precoding and power allocation (PA) algorithms based on the signal-to-leakage-plus-noise-ratio (SLNR) for the CoMP downlink. The proposed resource allocation and precoding algorithm selects the user equipment that can efficiently share the same resource block in the same cell without degrading the overall throughput by using the SLNR metric. This sharing is possible due to the existence of multiple transmitters within a cell in a CoMP setting. Additionally, we propose a set of PA algorithms that significantly improve the overall throughput and reduce the power consumption. The PA algorithms are based on solving a set of constrained convex optimization problems using the log-barrier penalty function approach based on the Newton method. We evaluate the proposed PA algorithms by comparing them to the iterative water-filling (IWF) algorithm. Performance evaluation results show that the proposed SLNR-based PA algorithms provide considerable performance gains in terms of the overall system throughput and are also shown to have even less power consumption compared to the IWF.