Sub-carrier allocation combined with coordinated multi-point transmission in multi-cell OFDMA system

In this paper, we proposed a heuristic algorithm to investigate the performance of resource allocation combined with coordinated multipoint(CoMP) in multi-cell OFDMA systems. We first develop an analytical model of resource allocation for an arbitrary number of users in the different cells, and formulate it into an optimization problem that is proved to be NP-complete. To reduce the computational complexity, we then design an algorithm consisted of three steps to approximately resolve the optimization problem. Simulation results show that the system with downlink CoMP transmission can obtain better performance than the conventional system, while satisfying the proportional fairness requirement of users. Furthermore, we found that the system performance greatly depends on the parameter α which is used to distinguish between CoMP user and center user.