Dynamic cooperation set clustering on base station cooperation cellular networks

Base station cooperation (BSC) has been identified as a key radio access technology for next-generation cellular networks such as LTE-Advanced. BSC maximizes its gains over non-cooperation (NC) in a network wherein interference from cooperating BSs is the main limitation. However, at locations where the signals from non-cooperating BSs are the dominant interference, the gains are minimal. Therefore, for every user equipment, the set of cooperating BSs must be properly selected in order to achieve the potential gains of BSC in a cellular network. In this paper, various BSC cluster types and cell regions are introduced, and the impact of dynamic clustering on BSC spectral efficiency is discussed. It is shown that to maximize the spectral efficiency gains of BSC multi-user MIMO to a UE, the BSs which induce the strongest received signal powers must be selected for cooperation. Simulation results show that by performing dynamic clustering, the geographical area at which BSC achieves better spectral efficiency over NC can be significantly increased over that of static clustering.