On energy efficiency of joint transmission coordinated multi-point in LTE-advanced

Coordinated Multi-Point (CoMP) transmission by neighboring base stations to mobile users is recently considered for both the cell-edge and the overall system throughput enhancements in next-generation cellular systems. As one of the most promising CoMP techniques, Joint Transmission (JT)-CoMP achieves higher spectral efficiency by exploiting cooperative diversity gains and inter-cell interference mitigation by coordinated transmission of the same information from multiple transmitting points. In this paper, we investigate the throughput and energy benefits of JT-CoMP transmission (over the conventional single-point transmission) in Long-Term Evolution (LTE) and LTE-Advanced homogeneous and heterogeneous network scenarios. For realistic rate/energy efficiency analysis, we propose a link-level modeling framework based on Finite State Markov Chain models for physical layer transport block transmission over the LTE radio access network. Results obtained show significant rate gains and energy savings using JT-CoMP (compared to the single-point transmission) especially for users in the cell-edge area.