Comparison of energy-efficiency in bits per joule on different downlink CoMP techniques

Coordinated MultiPoint (CoMP) transmission / reception techniques have been adopted by the 3GPP community for LTE-Advanced (Long Term Evolution-Advanced) to increase spectral efficiency and cell-edge throughput. Energy efficiency (EE) was previously ignored by most research efforts and was not considered by 3GPP as an important performance indicator until very recently. EE concerns have spurred considerable research in recent years as they enable both energy consumption and CO2 reduction over conventional cellular systems. As the “green evolution” becomes a major trend, energy-efficient transmission becomes more and more important. In this paper we investigate energy efficiency i.e., the number of corrected bits that can be transmitted throughout the channel per joule of energy consumed of different downlink CoMP techniques in LTE-Advanced. In addition, we use system level simulation to evaluate the performance.