A Location-Dependent Base Station Cooperation Scheme for Cellular Networks

The link quality in cellular networks strongly depends on the location of the users relative to the serving and interfering base stations (BSs). This paper proposes a location-dependent BS cooperation scheme for general cellular networks, where BSs are modeled using a stationary point process and the Voronoi diagram forms the cell structure. The cooperation scheme is based on the relative average received signal strength from the three strongest BSs. For the channel model where Rayleigh fading and power-law path loss are considered, each cell is partitioned into three regions based on the relative distance to the three nearest BSs: the cell center region, cell edge region, and cell corner region. The area fraction of each region is tuned by the so-called cooperation level gamma epsilon [0, 1]. We study the scheme where users in the above regions receive the non-coherent joint transmission from one, two, and three nearest BSs, respectively. As such, the scheme primarily helps users vulnerable to interference. We analyze the signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) in Poisson networks and show that a moderate gamma jointly improves the average SIR performance and the network fairness.