Cell Planning for Cooperative Transmission

Cooperative transmission (CT) (i.e. base station cooperation, multicell transmission) techniques have been shown to theoretically increase the average and cell-edge spectral efficiencies of cellular networks. These techniques aim to suppress or even take advantage of intercell signals. However, to realize the benefits of CT in actual cellular networks, cell planning parameters must be adjusted accordingly. This paper builds a framework that relates the two fields. It shows how coverage, traffic, handover and intercell-interference evaluation metrics are redefined for CT and how they are unified through the traffic coverage metric to lessen the cell plan optimization criteria. The cell planning framework allows comparison of full CT (or FCT, where all base stations can cooperate), group- wise CT (or GCT, where cooperation is by groups), and non- cooperative transmission (or NCT) designs. A simple network example shows that over NCT, CT permits superior network designs which have higher cell traffic, greater overlap of cell coverage areas and requires less number of base stations to meet the traffic demand. The service advantages of CT however, are offset by the expected higher cost of equipment due to additional complexity. The feasibility of using CT over NCT in a particular service area must therefore be carefully studied before network deployment.