Spatiotemporal Base Station Cooperation in a Cellular Network: The Worst-Case User

This paper presents a stochastic geometry model for studying spatiotemporal base station cooperation in a cellular network. Unlike most previous related works in the literature, the paper focuses on the coverage probability at the typical cellcorner user, i.e., a user that is equidistant to its three neighboring base stations (BSs). Three schemes are considered: joint transmission, base station silencing, and the Alamouti space-time code. In addition, BSs are allowed to cooperatively retransmit data across consecutive time slots, such that the cell-corner user can benefit from time diversity. For all these schemes, an expression for the coverage probability at the cell-corner user is derived. The best performing scheme is shown to be the Alamouti code, when only two BSs cooperate. Otherwise, cooperative retransmission performs the best in the high-coverage regime, while joint transmission without retransmission outperforms the remaining schemes in all other regimes. These results extend previous findings on spatiotemporal base station cooperation that only applied to the typical user in a cellular network.