An Optimized CoMP Transmission for a Heterogeneous Network Using eICIC Approach

Heterogeneous network deployment is considered to be among the most promising approaches to meet the demand for increasing communication capacity. The concept is that of increasing the number of cells while reducing their size to provide different layers of coverage. This paper proposes a coordinated method to face the interlayer and intralayer interference caused by the overlapping of heterogeneous cells. The aim is to exploit the benefits of both 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 top of a basic eICIC mechanism. Therefore, the analysis focuses on the dynamic selection of users and cells involved in CoMP operations, with the goal of minimizing the unfulfilled data rate requests (UDRRs). 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 UDRRs and signaling overhead.