Overcoming Large-Scale Fading in Cellular Systems With Network Coordination

Abstract

The cellular systems with network coordination are known for increasing the cell edge user throughput by processing signals captured by geographically distributed base stations coherently. This concept is also known as macrodiversity or coordinated multipoint (CoMP) in the literature. It is now well known that large-scale fading has a significant influence on the link-level performance of users in multiuser (MU) multicell systems. In this paper, we investigate a channel distribution information (CDI)-based MU multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) power control problem in the uplink with joint processing to overcome the large-scale fading in macrodiversity systems. There are many power control algorithms for different variants of this problem, but the CDI-based problem in MU scenario has not been well addressed in the literature. Perhaps, the lack of understanding of the performance of macrodiversity MU systems, in terms of CDI, may have prohibited advanced power control solutions. Despite such analytical difficulties, we propose a simple algorithm for this uplink power control problem, and its accuracy is proved using Monte Carlo simulation.Index Terms-Power control, CoMP, uplink, network MIMO, CDI, CSI, large scale fading, symbol error rates.