Improving cell-edge user performance with multi-streaming

Currently deployed cellular data systems limit any user to downlink reception only from a single base station. Recent standardization work on newer revisions of the HRPD and HSPA air-interface technologies relaxes this constraint by allowing multiple base stations to transmit independent data streams targeted towards a single user. We characterize the regions of performance gain for this technology, and investigate further improvements using advanced terminal receivers. The scheme is shown to be an effective load-balancing adaptation to bursty traffic at low to moderate loads. Furthermore, with a Successive Self Interference Cancellation capability at the device and Co-ordinating Scheduling at the base stations, further performance gains are demonstrated by favorably trading-off link adaptation loss for larger interference cancellation gains. 3 different schedulers are considered to intuit the ideal scheduler. Improvements are quantified when load is varied by increasing data usage per user, rather than increasing the number of users.