Joint scheduling for MU-CoMP in uplink LTE-advanced systems

It has been observed that on the uplink, coordinated multiple-point transmission (CoMP) can obtain significant performance improvements in interference rejection, which has been one of the key techniques in the Long Term Evaluation-Advanced (LTE-A) systems. Meanwhile, multi user-multiple input multiple output (MU-MIMO) can obviously enhance the system spectral efficiency by allocating the same time-frequency resource to multiple users. To obtain high network transmission quality, MU-CoMP will become the promising solution for LTE-A systems, in which the scheduling scheme is the key effect factor. In this paper, a joint scheduling scheme is proposed for optimally employing CoMP and MU-MIMO in the LTE-A systems based on two network topologies. To evaluate the effectiveness of the scheme, the performance of single user (SU)/MU adaptive CoMP using the proposed scheme is simulated and analyzed compared with SU-CoMP, and the simulation results show SU/MU-CoMP can achieve significant gain in cell average spectral efficiency.