Coordinated Multi-Point Clustering Schemes: A Survey

Abstract

Abstract-Mobile data traffic grew by 74% in 2015 and it's expected to grow 8-fold by 2020. Future wireless networks will need to deploy massive number of small cells to cope with this increasing demand. Dense deployment of small cells will require advanced interference mitigation techniques to improve spectral efficiency and enhance much needed capacity. Coordinated multi-point (CoMP) is a key feature for mitigating intercell interference, improve throughput and cell edge performance. However, cooperation will need to be limited to few cells only due to additional overhead required by CoMP due to channel state information (CSI) exchange, scheduling complexity and additional backhaul limitation. Hence small CoMP clusters will need to be formed in the network. This article surveys the stateof-the-art on one of the key challenges of CoMP implementation: CoMP clustering. As a starting point, we present the need for CoMP, the clustering challenge for 5G wireless networks and provide a brief essential background about CoMP and the enabling network architectures. We then provide the key framework for CoMP clustering and introduce self organisation as an important concept for effective CoMP clustering to maximise CoMP gains. Next, we present two novel taxonomies on existing CoMP clustering solutions, based on self organisation and aimed objective function. Strengths and weaknesses of the available clustering solutions in the literature are critically discussed. We then discuss future research areas and potential approaches for CoMP clustering. We present a future outlook on the utilisation of Big Data in cellular context to support proactive CoMP clustering based on prediction modelling. Finally we conclude this paper with a summary of lessons learnt in this field. This article aims to be a key guide for anyone who wants to research on CoMP clustering for future wireless networks.

Performance Analysis of Joint Transmission Schemes in Ultra-Dense Networks – A Unified Approach

“…In Rayleigh and Nakagami-m fading channels, similar results can be obtained by substituting the expectation of the channel (i.e., 1 and Ω, respectively) for h in Eqns. (7) and (8). Due to the limited space, the results are not listed in this paper.…”

Big Data Analytics for Large-scale Wireless Networks

“…With the growing demands of the bandwidth-ravenous applications, several new wireless access architectures, such as coordinated multipoint (CoMP) [19], massive MIMO [20], Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) [21] and cloudbased radio access network (C-RAN) [22] have been proposed. Besides, there is a trend of the fusion of cellular networks with other wireless networks, such as wireless LAN (WLANs), wireless personal area networks (WPANs), and small-cell networks together to form a heterogeneous network (HetNet) [23].…”

Virtual Cell Clustering with Optimal Resource Allocation to Maximize Cellular System Capacity

“…Multi-Point (CoMP) literature, see for example [5]- [15]. The work [16] presents an extensive literature survey of cell clustering for CoMP in wireless networks. The clustering of BSs and users can be divided into three groups: 1) Static clustering which considers a cellular network whose cells are clustered statically.…”