Checks and Balances: A Low-Complexity High-Gain Uplink Power Controller for CoMP

Abstract

Coordinated Multipoint (CoMP) promised substantial throughput gain for next-generation cellular systems. However, realizing this gain is costly in terms of pilots and backhaul bandwidth, and may require substantial modifications in physicallayer hardware. Targeting efficient throughput gain, we develop a novel coordinated power control scheme for uplink cellular networks called Checks and Balances (C&B), which checks the received signal strength of one user and its generated interference to neighboring base stations, and balances the two. C&B has some highly attractive advantages: C&B (i) can be implemented easily in software, (ii) does not require to upgrade non-CoMP physicallayer hardware, (iii) allows for fully distributed implementation for each user equipment (UE), and (iv) does not need extra pilots or backhaul communications. We evaluate the throughput performance of C&B on an uplink LTE system-level simulation platform, which is carefully calibrated with Huawei. Our simulation results show that C&B achieves much better throughput performance, compared to several widely-used power control schemes.