Interference Measurement Scheme for CoMP in LTE-Advanced Downlink

Coordinated multi-point (CoMP) transmission and reception is considered to be a promising technology to improve the cell-edge user throughput by mitigating the inter-cell interference, and it is expected to be specified in long-term evolution (LTE) Release 11 in 3GPP. For CoMP, the channel state information (CSI) feedback mechanism is a key factor in achieving a better throughput performance gain. This paper proposes two interference measurement schemes for CoMP in the LTE-Advanced downlink. In the proposed schemes, the existing CSI reference signal, which is used for CSI measurement, is fully utilized considering the impact to legacy user equipment, and a sufficient number of configurations for interference measurement resources are established to facilitate operator cell-planning efforts. Based on multi-cell link level and system-level simulations, we also confirm that the proposed schemes achieve an accurate interference measurement for a single transmission point and CoMP operation.