User-centric pre-selection and scheduling for coordinated multipoint systems

The data traffic volumes are constantly increasing in cellular networks. Furthermore, a larger part of the traffic is generated by applications that require high data rates. Techniques including Coordinated Multipoint transmission (CoMP) can increase the data rates, but at the cost of a high overhead. The overhead can be reduced if only a subset of the users is served with CoMP. In this paper, we propose a user selection approach, including pre-selection of CoMP users and short term scheduling, that takes user requirements into account. Users that require a high data rate to reach an acceptable level of service satisfaction are selected to use coherent joint processing CoMP in some of their downlink transmission bandwidth. Simulation results show that both the number of satisfied users and fairness are improved with the proposed user selection as compared to user selection that does not consider individual user requirements.