Performance of the LTE Uplink with Intra-Site Joint Detection and Joint Link Adaptation

We evaluate the performance of the uplink of a 3GPP UTRAN Long Term Evolution (LTE) system with intra-site cooperation, where different sectors belonging to the same site may cooperate with each other in order to improve the system performance. This represents an intermediate step towards general coordinated multipoint (CoMP) systems as currently under discussion for LTE-Advanced, where a cooperation might take place even between sectors belonging to different sites. In contrast to general CoMP systems, however, intra-site cooperation as considered here is already feasible with LTE Release 8 and generally does not suffer from any restrictions due to limitations of the underlying backhaul network. In this regard, we consider both joint detection as well as joint link adaptation and we investigate the achievable performance for various cases by means of extensive system-level simulations. It is shown that intra-site cooperation may yield significant performance gains compared to conventional systems at reasonable complexity, thus making it a suitable approach for implementation in real-world networks.