Distributed uplink CoMP for small-cell networks

Uplink Co-ordinated Multi-Point (UL CoMP) is an important technique to significantly improve user performance, especially in dense small-cell networks. In such networks it is important that co-operation be (a) scalable w.r.t. number of cells (b) adaptable to different inter-connect bandwidths. In this paper, we propose near-optimal distributed mechanisms to enable uplink co-operation. We develop protocols for distributed helper-cell SINR measurement as well as adaptation algorithms to manage limited interconnect bandwidth. We show that the performance of the proposed one-shot bandwidth control algorithm is close to the optimal iterative algorithm proposed in [1].