Coordinated Multi-point Users Research Articles

On the Application of Quasi-Degradation to Network NOMA in Downlink CoMP Systems

The application of network non-orthogonal multiple access (N-NOMA) technique to coordinated multi-point (CoMP) systems has attracted significant attention due to its superior capability to improve connectivity and maintain reliable transmission for CoMP users simultaneously. Based on the concept of quasi-degraded channel for N-NOMA, this paper studies the precoding design for downlink N-NOMA scenarios with two base stations (BSs) equipped with multiple antennas. In specific, under quasi-degraded channels, simple linear precoding based N-NOMA can achieve the same minimal total transmission power as theoretically optimal but complicated dirty paper coding (DPC) scheme, when the users’ target rates and minimal transmission power of each BS are given. In this paper, the channel quasi-degradation (QD) condition is first rigorously derived for the scenario with single CoMP user and two NOMA users. The closed-form optimal precoders for N-NOMA under quasi-degraded channels are also provided. Then, based on QD condition, a novel hybrid N-NOMA (H-N-NOMA) scheme is proposed, which is a mixture of N-NOMA and conventional zero-forcing beamforming (ZFBF) scheme. Further, for the scenarios with more users, a low-complexity QD based user pairing (QDUP) algorithm is proposed, which is then combined with H-N-NOMA to make a novel scheme termed H-N-NOMA/QDUP into being. Numerical results are presented to reveal the impact factors on QD channels, and also demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed H-N-NOMA/QDUP scheme. It is shown that the proposed H-N-NOMA/QDUP scheme can effectively exploit the benefit of multi user diversity.

Flexible Guard Structure for Timing Synchronization in Coordinated Networks

In this letter, a novel and flexible hybrid guard duration (HGD) based on zero tail (ZT) and cyclic prefix (CP) concepts is proposed for facilitating timing synchronization (TS) in coordinated multi-point (COMP) networks. The proposed HGD harmoniously provides enough guard duration for mitigating the channel’s delay spread and facilitating TS without extending the total symbol duration while supporting both COMP and non-COMP users. That is, unlike the traditional extended CP (E-CP) approach that degrades the system’s spectral efficiency (SE) and elevates the transmission latency due to the extended symbol duration, HGD maintains the usage of the normal CP size and the total symbol duration, thereby ensuring better SE performance and relatively low latency. The proposed HGD is evaluated and compared with the traditional E-CP in terms of bit error rate, SE, and latency.

On the Outage Performance of Network NOMA (N-NOMA) Modeled by Poisson Line Cox Point Process

This paper studies the application of network non-orthogonal multiple access (N-NOMA) to vehicular communication networks, modeled by a Poisson line Cox point process (PLC). Particularly, the road infrastructure is modeled by a Poisson line point process (PLP), whereas base stations (BSs) and users are located according to 1D homogeneous Poisson point processes (HPPPs) on each road. In the considered N-NOMA scheme, there are two types of users, i.e., coordinated multi-point (CoMP) users which are far from their BSs and NOMA users which are close to their BSs, where the CoMP users and the NOMA users are served simultaneously by applying the principle of NOMA. Specifically, the BSs collaborate with each other to provide reliable transmission for the CoMP user by applying Almouti coding, while each BS employs superposition coding to opportunistically serve an additional NOMA user. Compared to a conventional OMA based scheme, where only a CoMP user is served, the proposed N-NOMA scheme significantly improves the performance in terms of outage sum rates and user connectivity, since more users are served in the same resource block. A comprehensive analytical framework is developed to characterize the system level performance of the proposed N-NOMA scheme by applying PLC. Closed form expressions for the outage probabilities achieved by the CoMP and NOMA users are obtained. Computer simulation results are provided to show the superior performance of the proposed scheme and also validate the accuracy of the developed analytical results.

CoMP Transmission in Downlink NOMA-Based Heterogeneous Cloud Radio Access Networks

In this paper, we investigate the integration between the coordinated multipoint (CoMP) transmission and the non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) in downlink heterogeneous cloud radio access networks (H-CRANs). In H-CRAN, low-power high-density small remote radio heads (SRRHs) are underlaid by high-power low-density macro RRH (MRRH). However, co-channel deployment of the different RRHs gives rise to the problem of inter-cell interference that significantly affects system performance especially the cell-edge users. Thus, the users are first categorized into Non-CoMP users and CoMP users based on the relation between the useful signal to the dominant interference signal. The Non-CoMP user is the user equipment (UEs) having high signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio (INR) and hence associates with only one RRH. On the other hand, the CoMP user, cell-edge user, is the UE that experiences less distinctive received power with the best two RRHs. In the proposed CoMP-NOMA framework, each RRH schedules CoMP-UE and non-CoMP-UE over the same transmission channel using NOMA. We first design an analytical framework based on tools from the stochastic geometry to evaluate the performance of the proposed framework (CoMP-NOMA) which is based on H-CRAN in terms of the average achievable data rate for each NOMA UE. We then examine the spectral efficiency of the proposed CoMP-NOMA based H-CRAN. Simulation results are provided to validate the accuracy of the analytical models and to reveal the superiority of the proposed CoMP-NOMA framework compared with conventional CoMP orthogonal multiple access (CoMP-OMA) techniques. By reaping the benefits of both JT-CoMP and NOMA, we prove that the proposed framework can successfully deal with the inter-cell interference by using CoMP and improve the network's spectral efficiency through NOMA technique. We also show that, with an appropriate power allocation coefficient setting at the Non-CoMP-UEs, a fairness performance can be achieved between the CoMP-UEs and the Non-CoMP-UEs.

Downlink Power Allocation for CoMP-NOMA in Multi-Cell Networks

This paper considers the problem of dynamic power allocation in the downlink of multi-cell networks, where each cell utilizes non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA)-based resource allocation. Also, coordinated multi-point (CoMP) transmission is utilized among multiple cells to serve users experiencing severe inter-cell interference (ICI). Under this CoMP- NOMA framework, CoMP transmission is applied to a user experiencing less distinctive channel gain with multiple base stations (BSs)/cells (i.e., severe ICI-prone user) and non-CoMP transmission (i.e., transmission without any coordination among multiple BSs) is applied to a user experiencing dominating channel gain with only one BS/cell, while NOMA is utilized at each BS to schedule CoMP and non-CoMP users over the same transmission resources, i.e., time, spectrum and space. After discussing various CoMP- NOMA models for downlink power allocation in multi-cell networks, we focus on a joint transmission CoMP- NOMA (JT-CoMP-NOMA) model. For the JT-CoMP-NOMA model, an optimal joint power allocation problem is formulated and the solution is derived for each CoMP- set consisting of multiple cooperating BSs (i.e., CoMP BSs). To avoid the huge computational complexity of the joint power optimization approach, we propose a distributed power optimization approach at each cooperating BS whose optimal solution is independent of the solution of other coordinating BSs. The distributed solution for the joint power optimization problem is validated and numerical performance evaluation is carried out for the proposed CoMP- NOMA models including JT-CoMP-NOMA and coordinated scheduling CoMP- NOMA (CS-CoMP-NOMA). The obtained results reveal significant gains in spectral and energy efficiency in comparison with conventional CoMP- orthogonal multiple access (CoMP-OMA) systems.

Dynamic Cooperative Base Station Selection Scheme for Downlink CoMP in LTE-Advanced Networks

Coordinated Multi-Point (CoMP) transmission is a technique proposed to enhance the spectral efficiency and system throughput in an interference limited cellular networks. In CoMP joint processing (JP) scheme multiple base stations (BSs) are coordinately transmit data streams to each user. As more than two base stations are involved, abundant spatial resources are exploited and more backhaul spectrum for JP cooperation is required. The backhaul architecture for CoMP JP is crucial to provide low latency, unlimited capacity, less power consumption, and perfect synchronization among the BSs. However, satisfying all these constraints is impossible as the number of cooperative BSs increases for each user. In this paper, a dynamic cooperative base station selection scheme is proposed to reduce the backhaul load for CoMP user by selecting the appropriate number of coordinated BSs from the CoMP cluster to ensure the certain quality of service (QoS). In particular, for cell edge user the number of cooperative BSs per user has been selected in order to achieve reduced overhead and the allocation of backhaul capacity is performed under the max---min fairness criterion. Simulation results show that the proposed selection scheme achieves significant performance improvement than other transmission modes in terms of the average sum rate per backhaul use and minimal total power consumption.

Vector perturbation based adaptive distributed precoding scheme with limited feedback for CoMP systems

A downlink adaptive distributed precoding scheme is proposed for coordinated multi-point (CoMP) transmission systems. The serving base station (BS) obtains the optimal precoding vector via user feedback. Meanwhile, the precoding vector of each coordinated BS is determined by adaptive gradient iteration according to the perturbation vector and the adjustment factor based on the vector perturbation method. In each transmission frame, the CoMP user feeds the precoding matrix index back to the serving BS, and feeds back the adjustment factor index to the coordinated BSs, which can reduce the uplink feedback overhead. The selected adjustment factor for each coordinated BS is obtained via the precoding vector of the coordinated BS used in the previous frame and the preferred precoding vector of the serving BS in this frame. The proposed scheme takes advantage of the spatial non-correlation and temporal correlation of the distributed MIMO channel. The design of the adjustment factor set is given and the channel feedback delay is considered. The system performance of the proposed scheme is verified with and without feedback delay respectively and the system feedback overhead is analyzed. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme has a good trade-off between system performance and the system control information overhead on feedback.