Coordinated Multipoint Systems Research Articles

Performance Evaluation with Improved Receiver Design for Asynchronous Coordinated Multipoint Transmissions

Joint transmission is one of the major transmission schemes in Coordinated multipoint (CoMP) transmission/reception systems for Long term evolutionadvanced (LTE-A). Due to different distances between User equipments (UE) and Base stations (BS), signals are not able to arrive at the receiver with perfect synchronization, which implies that the reception at UE is asynchronous. This paper presents an evaluation on asynchronous UE reception in multi-cell downlink joint transmission systems using our LTE-based CoMP simulator. Then, due to asynchronous reception, we propose an improved reception strategy to mitigate the interference which compensate for Rx timing difference on Joint transmission (JT) CoMP systems. Simulation results show that the per-subband global precoding scheme widely used in the CoMP system is considerably sensitive to asynchronous reception since the performance is dominated by the subcarrier used for precoding vector calculation. It is verified that our proposed solution is able to achieve significant improvements under asynchronous reception.

Precoder‐and‐receiver design scheme for multi‐user coordinated multi‐point in LTE‐A and fifth generation systems

Coordinated multi-point (CoMP) techniques can be utilised in several wireless systems, such as LTE-A and fifth generation. However, inter-user interferences (IEIs) and intra-user interferences (IAIs) may degrade the quality of service in joint transmission (JT), CoMP systems. To suppress these interferences, the authors design an interference mitigation scheme via interference alignment (IA) and channel diagonalisation (IMS-IACD), which is implemented through a local two-step precoder-and-receiver design process. First, IA is employed to force the IEIs of each user into the interfering space. Second, the IAIs of each user are effectively suppressed by channel diagonalisation with a selective method. Performance analyses show that the IMS-IACD is feasible in general JT scenarios. The IMS-IACD does not contain any iterative process and superabundant information interaction. The structure of receiver generated by the authors’ channel diagonalisation method is quite simple, so the energy consumption can be saved by using this receiver. Moreover, computational complexities of the IMS-IACD and traditional schemes are in the same order of magnitude, and simulation results illustrate that the IMS-IACD improves the bit error rates and data rates for users.

Energy Efficient Feedback Design for Coordinated Multi-Point Transmission in Downlink

Coordinated multi-point (CoMP) has been raised to increase the average cell throughput and the cell-edge user throughput. However, the energy consumption of mobile stations (MSs) is a key problem restricting the wide application of CoMP systems. Considering the energy consumption of feeding back channel state information (CSI) by MSs and the influence of CSI accuracy on the throughput of system, it is proposed to measure the relationship between feedback energy consumption and throughput with energy efficiency feedback utility (EEFU) function which can adapt to different application scenes by adjusting utilization coefficient. The feedback utilization of two precoders in CoMP systems is analyzed respectively, including the optimization allocation of feedback bits with utility function. The complete EEFU optimized expression and the optimizing flow path satisfying the actual application demands of CoMP systems are then derived. The simulation results illustrate the practicability and necessity of the EEFU function and verify the performance of EEFU with different precoders.

SINR Estimation in Limited Feedback Coordinated Multipoint Systems

Coordinated multipoint (CoMP) transmission can provide high spectral efficiency for cellular systems if perfect channels are available. In limited feedback systems, except for channel direction, signal-to-noise-plus-interference ratio (SINR) is necessary to assist in user scheduling and adaptive transmission. When the methods to estimate SINR in single-cell systems is applied to CoMP systems, the performance will significantly degrade. In this paper, we estimate the SINR for downlink CoMP systems. We start by showing that the quantization error vector is no longer isotropic when quantizing CoMP channels. This implies that the vector has an inherent structure. We proceed to formulate an optimization problem to find the quantization error vector that maximizes the multiuser interference power under the structure constraint. This way, we can exploit the nonisotropic nature of the quantization error vector and avoid overestimating the SINR. Simulation results show that the proposed method provides high throughput and low outage probability with negligible extra feedback overhead.

Coordinated Multi-Point Transmission With Imperfect CSI and Other-Cell Interference

Coordinated Multi-Point (CoMP) transmission for LTE-Advanced systems promises enhanced throughput and coverage performance, especially for cell edge users. However, the performance of CoMP systems heavily depends on the feedback quality and channel imperfections. In this paper, we investigate the impact of quantized and delayed channel state information (CSI) on the average achievable rate of joint transmission (JT) and coordinated beamforming (CBF) systems. We derive closed-form expressions and accurate approximations on the expected sum rate of CoMP systems with imperfect CSI assuming small-scale Rayleigh fading, pathloss attenuation, and other-cell interference (OCI). Furthermore, for analytical tractability, we employ a moment matching technique that approximates the distributions of the received desired and interference signals. Based on our analytical framework, we show that CBF and JT to multiple users are more sensitive to CSI imperfections than single-user JT and we identify switching points and optimal operating regimes for each scheme. Furthermore, we propose an adaptive multimode transmission technique that switches between CoMP schemes to maximize the sum rate. Finally, the proposed approximate framework enables us to identify key system parameters, such as feedback resolution, delay, pathloss, and transmit SNR for which CoMP becomes a judicious choice of transmission strategy as compared to non-cooperative transmission.

Energy-Efficient Resource Allocation in CoMP Systems with Backhaul Capacity Constraints

Energy efficient resource allocation is one of the critical issues for the coordinated multipoint (CoMP) transmission system, where the signal received by each mobile station needs to be converged among multiple base stations (BSs) in the same cluster. However, as the interaction of the system is frequent, the overhead of the backhaul signaling will be enormous. In this paper, an iterative resource allocation and scheduling algorithm (IRASA) with dual method is proposed to solve the optimization problem aiming to maximize the system energy efficiency, which considers the backhaul capacity constraints, circuit power consumption and zero forcing pre-coding (ZFP). Simulation results show that our proposed IRASA can significantly improve the energy efficiency of the system with the backhaul capacity constraints.

Radio Resource Management of CoMP System in HetNet under Power and Backhaul Constraints

Recently, Heterogeneous Network (HetNet) with Coordinated Multi-Point (CoMP) scheme is introduced into Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) systems to improve digital services for User Equipments (UEs), especially for cell-edge UEs. However, Radio Resource Management (RRM), including Resource Block (RB) scheduling and Power Allocation (PA), in this scenario becomes challenging, due to the intercell cooperation. In this paper, we investigate the RRM problem for downlink transmission of HetNet system with Joint Processing (JP) CoMP (both joint transmission and dynamic cell selection schemes), aiming at maximizing weighted sum data rate under the constraints of both transmission power and backhaul capacity. First, joint RB scheduling and PA problem is formulated as a constrained Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) which is NP-hard. To simplify the formulation problem, we decompose it into two problems of RB scheduling and PA. For RB scheduling, we propose an algorithm with less computational complexity to achieve a suboptimal solution. Then, according to the obtained scheduling results, we present an iterative Karush-Kuhn- Tucker (KKT) method to solve the PA problem. Extensive simulations are conducted to verify the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithms. Two kinds of JP CoMP schemes are compared with a non-CoMP greedy scheme (max capacity scheme). Simulation results prove that the CoMP schemes with the proposed RRM algorithms dramatically enhance data rate of cell-edge UEs, thereby improving UEs fairness of data rate. Also, it is shown that the proposed PA algorithms can decrease power consumption of transmission antennas without loss of transmission performance.

Evolution of Limited-Feedback CoMP Systems from 4G to 5G: CoMP Features and Limited-Feedback Approaches

Coordinated multipoint (CoMP) transmission/reception has been adopted as a key technology to alleviate the intercell interference (ICI) in fourthgeneration (4G) mobile communication. This article reviews the state of the art in limited-feedback CoMP systems research. We first give an overview of recent related work in feedback-based coordinated transmission and then provide a performance analysis of typical feedback schemes and sensitivity to the channel state information (CSI) delay. To back up the discussion, we have validated the benefits of CoMP using field-test results from a CoMP trial network built at the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications (BUPT) campus. Furthermore, since mobile systems evolving to fifth generation (5G) have to bear a huge quantity of irregularly distributed wireless data traffic, cooperative communication will be more widely applied not only to address the ICI but also to improve the system resource utilization and data rate. We summarize the recent trend on 5G network architectures enabling the novel CoMP features, and we discuss the potential evolution directions of limited-feedback approaches motivated by CoMP development toward future 5G networks.

Uplink bit combining for multiple base‐stations MIMO with applications to CoMP systems

AbstractThis work considers a simple bit level combining technique, aided by robust bit reliability information, for uplink collaborating multiple‐input multiple‐output (MIMO) base‐stations (also known as macrodiversity MIMO), operating over composite Rayleigh‐lognormal fading channels. Bit reliability weights based on a robust modification of the logarithmic likelihood ratio, combined with instantaneous symbol signal‐to‐noise ratio information, are derived for different local MIMO detection schemes. This bit reliability information is used at the fusion center, together with locally detected data, for combining and producing final information bits delivered to the destination. Computer simulation results confirm that such bit level combining techniques, when used with minimum mean squared error ordered successive interference cancelation and also with sphere decoding maximum likelihood local detectors, provide significant performance improvements over non‐collaborative base‐stations systems. Performance gains are maintained even when these schemes suffer from channel estimation errors and also in the presence of space correlation. Low backhaul overhead and performance advantages make these bit level combining techniques attractive for applications in next generation cellular systems employing coordinated multi‐point (CoMP) technology, as well as for other collaborative MIMO communication schemes.Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A dynamic clustering algorithm for downlink CoMP systems with multiple antenna UEs

Coordinated multi-point (CoMP) schemes have been widely studied in the recent years to tackle the inter-cell interference. In practice, latency and throughput constraints on the backhaul allow the organization of only small clusters of base stations (BSs) where joint processing (JP) can be implemented. In this work we focus on downlink CoMP-JP with multiple antenna user equipments (UEs) and propose a novel dynamic clustering algorithm. The additional degrees of freedom at the UE can be used to suppress the residual interference by using an interference rejection combiner (IRC) and allow a multistream transmission. In our proposal we first define a set of candidate clusters depending on long-term channel conditions. Then, in each time block, we develop a resource allocation scheme by jointly optimizing transmitter and receiver where: a) within each candidate cluster a weighted sum rate is estimated and then b) a set of clusters is scheduled in order to maximize the system weighted sum rate. Numerical results show that much higher rates are achieved when UEs are equipped with multiple antennas. Moreover, as this performance improvement is mainly due to the IRC, the gain achieved by the proposed approach with respect to the non-cooperative scheme decreases by increasing the number of UE antennas.

CoMP Meets Smart Grid: A New Communication and Energy Cooperation Paradigm

In this paper, we pursue a unified study on smart grid and coordinated multi-point (CoMP) enabled wireless communication by investigating a new joint communication and energy cooperation approach. We consider a practical CoMP system with clustered multiple-antenna base stations (BSs) cooperatively communicating with multiple single-antenna mobile terminals (MTs), where each BS is equipped with local renewable energy generators to supply power and also a smart meter to enable two-way energy flow with the grid. We propose a new energy cooperation paradigm, where a group of BSs dynamically share their renewable energy for more efficient operation via locally injecting/drawing power to/from an aggregator with a zero effective sum-energy exchanged. Under this new energy cooperation model, we consider the downlink transmission in one CoMP cluster with cooperative zero-forcing (ZF) based precoding at the BSs. We maximize the weighted sum-rate for all MTs by jointly optimizing the transmit power allocations at cooperative BSs and their exchanged energy amounts subject to a new type of power constraints featuring energy cooperation among BSs with practical loss ratios. Our new setup with BSs' energy cooperation generalizes the conventional CoMP transmit optimization under BSs' sum-power or individual-power constraints. Finally, we validate our results by simulations under various practical setups, and show that the proposed joint communication and energy cooperation scheme substantially improves the downlink throughput of CoMP systems powered by smart grid and renewable energy, as compared to other suboptimal designs without communication and/or energy cooperation.

Research on Per-cell Codebook based Channel Quantization for CoMP Transmission

Coordinated multi-point (CoMP) transmission has been regarded as a potential technology for LTE-Advanced. In frequency division duplexing systems, channel quantization is applied for reporting channel state information (CSI). Considering the dynamic number of cooperation base stations (BSs), asymmetry feature of CoMP channels and high searching complexity, simply increasing the size of the codebook used in traditional multiple antenna systems to quantize the global CSI of CoMP systems directly is infeasible. Per-cell codebook based channel quantization to quantize local CSI for each BS separately is an effective method. In this paper, the theoretical upper bounds of system throughput are derived for two codeword selection schemes, independent codeword selection (ICS) and joint codeword selection (JCS), respectively. The feedback overhead and selection complexity of these two schemes are analyzed. In the simulation, the system throughput of ICS and JCS is compared. Both analysis and simulation results show that JCS has a better tradeoff between system throughput and feedback overhead. The ICS has obvious advantage in complexity, but it needs additional phase information (PI) feedback for obtaining the approximate system throughput with JCS. Under the same number of feedback bits constraint, allocating the number of bits for channel direction information (CDI) and PI quantization can increase the system throughput, but ICS is still inferior to JCS. Based on theoretical analysis and simulation results, some recommendations are given with regard to the application of each scheme respectively.

Intrinsic interference mitigating coordinated beamforming for the FBMC/OQAM based downlink

In this work, we propose intrinsic interference mitigating coordinated beamforming (IIM-CBF)-based transmission strategies for the downlink of multi-user multiple-input-multiple-out (MIMO) systems and coordinated multi-point (CoMP) systems where filter bank based multi-carrier with offset quadrature amplitude modulation (FBMC/OQAM) is employed. Our goal is to alleviate the dimensionality constraint imposed on the state-of-the-art solutions for FBMC/OQAM-based space division multiple access that the total number of receive antennas of the users must not exceed the number of transmit antennas at the base station. First, two IIM-CBF algorithms are developed for a single-cell multi-user MIMO downlink system. The central idea is to jointly and iteratively calculate the precoding matrix and decoding matrix for each subcarrier to mitigate the multi-user interference as well as the intrinsic interference inherent in FBMC/OQAM-based systems. Second, for a CoMP downlink scenario where partial coordination among the base stations is considered, the application of coordinated beamforming-based transmission schemes is further investigated. An appropriate IIM-CBF technique is proposed. Simulation results show that when the number of transmit antennas at the base station is equal to the total number of receive antennas of the users, the proposed IIM-CBF algorithm outperforms the existing transmission strategies for FBMC/OQAM-based multi-user MIMO downlink systems. Moreover, we evaluate the performances of the IIM-CBF schemes in the downlink of multi-user MIMO systems and CoMP systems where the total number of receive antennas of users exceeds the number of transmit antennas at the base station. It is observed that by employing the IIM-CBF techniques, FBMC/OQAM systems achieve a similar bit error rate (BER) performance as its orthogonal frequency division multiplexing with the cyclic prefix insertion (CP-OFDM)-based counterpart while exhibiting superiority in terms of a higher spectral efficiency, a greater robustness against synchronization errors, and a lower out-of-band radiation. In the presence of residual carrier frequency offsets, FBMC/OQAM systems provide a much better performance compared to the CP-OFDM-based system, which corroborates the theoretical analysis that FBMC/OQAM systems are more immune to the lack of perfect synchronization. In addition, numerical results with respect to the convergence behavior of the IIM-CBF techniques are presented, and the computational complexity issue is also addressed.

Distributed Energy-Efficient Power Optimization for CoMP Systems With Max-Min Fairness

This letter considers the power optimization problem for downlink transmission in coordinated multi-point (CoMP) systems. We aim to maximize the minimum weighted energy efficiency (EE) with QoS constraint and limited intercell coordination. The established optimization problem is converted to the standard form of max-min fractional programming problem first. Then we discuss feasibility of the Dual Dinkelbach-type Algorithm (DDA). A distributed algorithm is proposed to solve the subproblem in DDA with limited intercell coordination, where only a small number of positive scalars are shared between base stations. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms previous schemes in terms of both the minimum EE of all the BSs' EE and fairness.

Clustering and scheduling methods based on SLNR in downlink CoMP system

In downlink coordinated multi-point (CoMP) system, full cooperation is always not applicable in real world because of its high request in the backhaul. To deal with this problem, clustering decision is made to process transmission. In this paper clustering methods based on the metric signal-to-leakage-plus-noise (SLNR) is proposed. In addition, user scheduling schemes based on SLNR is also put up to make the scheduling set as large as possible. Simulation results show that the proposed clustering methods not only reduce the data sharing among the cooperating base stations (BSs), but also improve the system throughput compared with the traditional clustering methods based on channel strength.

The Value of Channel Prediction in CoMP Systems with Large Backhaul Latency

The potential of coordinated multi-point (CoMP) transmission in providing high spectral efficiency for cellular systems largely depends on the channel quality at the cooperated base stations. In this paper, we investigate whether channel prediction is useful for downlink CoMP systems with backhaul latency in time-varying channels, where both the centralized and decentralized CoMP joint processing (CoMP-JP) as well as the CoMP coordinated beamforming (CoMP-CB) are considered. Toward this goal, we resort to large system analysis with large number of transmit antennas to derive closed form expressions of the average per-user rate of the CoMP systems, when predicted or estimated channels are employed for downlink precoding. By comparing with Non-CoMP systems, we find that channel prediction provides much higher performance gain over channel estimation for CoMP systems, depending on the strategy of the cooperation and the user location. As a result, CoMP systems can perform fairly well for mobile users even under the large backhaul latency, if channel prediction will be used instead of channel estimation. Simulation results are provided to validate our analysis.

Near Optimal Implicit Feedback Generation for Coordinated Multipoint Transmission

Coordinated multipoint (CoMP) has been identified as a key technology of mitigating interference and improving spectral efficiency of cell edge users in long term evolution (LTE) release 11 and beyond systems. As CoMP operates mostly in a closed-loop transmission fashion, one of the most critical implementation challenges in CoMP systems is the feedback generation. In this letter, a novel, low-complexity method for the feedback generation in CoMP systems is proposed. The key idea of the proposed scheme is to iteratively align received signals from different transmission points by the precoder feedback. The analytical and numerical results show that the proposed scheme is capable of attaining almost optimal gain in signal to noise ratio (SNR), achieving a good performance-complexity trade-off and being robust against the non-ideal system environment when compared to conventional schemes.

Joint Scheduling and Resource Allocation with Fairness Based on the Signal-to-Leakage-plus-Noise Ratio in the Downlink of CoMP Systems

Recent research has shown that coordinated multi point (CoMP) transmission can provide significant gains in terms of the overall cell capacity and cell-edge user throughput [1]. The main purpose of this paper is to enhance the overall cell throughput, the cell-edge user’s throughput, and the fairness among user equipment terminals (UEs) in LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) systems using CoMP. Towards that end, we propose two novel resource allocation (RA) strategies based on the Signal-to-Leakage-plus-Noise-Ratio (SLNR) for the downlink of CoMP transmission in LTE-A systems. The proposed RA strategies select the UEs that can efficiently share the same resource block (RB) without degrading the overall throughput by using the SLNR metric. Moreover, a fairness algorithm is proposed to achieve certain level of fairness among the UEs and to improve the cell-edge UEs throughput. In addition, we compare the proposed strategies to the RA based on the more common Signal-to-Interference-plus-Noise-Ratio (SINR) strategy. The SLNR-based RA is shown to provide significant gains in throughput reaching up to 80 % in the overall system and is shown to have even less complexity than the typical SINR-based RA. Moreover, by evaluating the proposed strategies in terms of the average cell throughput, cell-edge user throughput, and fairness among UEs, simulations show that the proposed strategies present superior performance compared to the more common SINR strategy. With such advantages as enhanced throughput and lower complexity, the proposed schemes are suitable for application in practical cellular systems.

Coordinated Multi-Point Transmission Strategies for TDD Systems with Non-Ideal Channel Reciprocity

This paper studies transmission strategies for downlink time division duplex coordinated multi-point (CoMP) systems with non-ideal uplink-downlink channel reciprocity, where several multi-antenna base stations (BSs) jointly serve multiple single-antenna users. Due to the inherent antenna calibration errors among different BSs, the uplink-downlink channels are no longer reciprocal such that the channel information at the BSs is with multiplicative noises. To mitigate the performance degradation caused by the imperfect channels, we employ a weighted sum rate estimate as the objective function for robust precoder design. To show the impact of data sharing on the performance of CoMP under the non-ideal channel reciprocity, we provide a unified framework for designing precoder for CoMP systems with different amount of data sharing. The optimal parametric linear precoder structure that maximizes the weighted sum rate estimate under per-BS power constraints is characterized, based on which a closed-form robust signal-to-leakage-plus-noise ratio (SLNR) precoder is proposed to exploit the statistics of the calibration errors. Simulation results show that the proposed precoder in conjunction with user scheduling provides substantial performance gain over Non-CoMP transmission and the CoMP transmission with non-robust precoders.

What should be fed back for per‐cell codebook‐based limited feedback coordinated multi‐point systems?

Per‐cell codebook‐based limited feedback is highly desirable in coordinated multi‐point (CoMP) systems owing to flexibility and compatibility. Except for the per‐cell codeword indices, each user should feed back other information for the central unit to reconstruct global channel direction information (CDI) and estimate channel quality information (CQI) for downlink transmission. In this paper, we analyze the essential feedback information for per‐cell codebook‐based coherent CoMP systems. To show what should be fed back to estimate the CQI, we first derive a conservative CQI estimation to avoid the outage in transmission, which depends on the quantization accuracy and the norm of the global channel. We then analyze whether the per‐cell small‐scale fading channel norms are necessary to feed back in obtaining the global channel norm and reconstructing the global CDI. Next, we analyze whether the feedback of phase ambiguity (PA) is necessary. Both the analysis and simulation results show that the global channel norm should be fed back instead of the per‐cell channel norms. The benefit of the PA feedback is evident only when the number of base stations is large and the number of antennas at each base station is small.