Coordinated multi point transmission in 3GPP LTE heterogeneous networks

This paper summarizes coordinated multi point transmission (CoMP) operation in heterogeneous network deployments. Such scenarios have recently attracted significant attention in 3GPP where an ongoing work item is scheduled to be completed in the LTE Release 11 timeframe. An important focus of this paper is to analyze both the CoMP schemes and the deployment architectures that have been considered in 3GPP. We provide a detailed comparison of benefits and drawbacks for both based on system-level evaluations. Further, CoMP is compared against an eICIC performance baseline which does not rely on tight coordination as in the case of CoMP.