Single and multi-cell scheduling in coordinated multi-point distributed antenna systems

Multi-cell coordination is a technique for interference mitigation in cellular systems. For joint-transmission (JT), the received signal power is boosted by diversity combining of signals from multiple transmission points. This however results in reduced frequency-reuse ratio and cell-splitting order, which may subsequently degrade the network-level throughput. In order to strike a balance between the diversity combining gain and frequency-reuse ratio, in this paper we propose a dynamic scheduling algorithm that adaptively schedules users in single-cell or multi-cell transmission mode to maximize the system sum throughput. Furthermore, basestation association for each user is meticulously addressed to avoid negatively impacting the frequency-reuse gain. The proposed algorithm is evaluated with system-level evaluation tools fully compliant with 3GPP LTE specification, thereby providing a realistic assessment on the gain of multi-cell coordination in terms of system capacity and coverage.