Coordinated Multipoint Communications In Heterogeneous Networks

Abstract

As users' demands on cellular service escalate rapidly, operators are required to deploy technologies with wider and more sophisticated techniques. In order to meet the future service needs, the standardization body 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has standardized Long Term Evolution (LTE) and it has been working on enhancement of LTE and LTE-Advanced. The two key enabling technologies of LTE-Advanced are Heterogeneous Networks (HetNets) and Coordinated Multipoint (CoMP) communications. The former is aimed to improve inconsistent user experience and its basic feature is standardized in 3GPP release 11. The latter one where small cells are deployed within macro-cellular networks has been considered to enhance coverage and capacity.

This thesis presents a concise literature survey of cooperative communications and CoMP technologies. Furthermore, a detailed Matlab-based simulation study on CoMP between macro and small cells in HetNets is presented. Comparative analyses and evaluations are also made for different CoMP schemes under different deployed scenarios. At the same time, a new CoMP UE selection criterion is proposed to fit the modified round robin scheduling deployed in simulation and optimize the resource allocation among CoMP and non-CoMP UEs.