User-centric architectures: Enabling CoMP via hardware virtualization

Motivated by the difficulty in mapping theoretic Coordinated Multi-Point (CoMP) studies into real-world solutions, herein we propose a novel architectural solution for CoMP-based systems. The basic idea is to dynamically allocate virtual processing resources in a base band unit pool, to sets of transmission points, these processing resources being used for jointly transmitting to a given set of users. This proposal corresponds in dropping the cell as the elementary processing unit, and tailoring the system architecture to optimize the service for each user. Such an architecture allows a much easier implementation of advanced CoMP solutions.