Analysis and evaluation of Cooperative Multi-Point transmission/reception and soft handover for LTE-Advanced

Network coordination provided by Cooperative Multi-Point transmission/reception (CoMP) in 3GPP LTE-Advanced networks is used as a means to provide spectrally efficient and high capacity communication with enhanced cell edge user throughput. However, it has been observed that in LTE-Advanced networks when CoMP scheme is employed and the legacy handover mechanism is used to perform handover between coordinating cells, its performance is limited. LTE-Advanced networks using CoMP scheme are able to use a soft handover mechanism different from the hard handover mechanism used in existing cellular networks. In this paper, we analyze the effects on performance and efficiency for users in LTE-Advanced networks employing CoMP Joint Processing (JP) scheme and Adaptive OFDM with the help of simulations and observe gains in comparison to conventional networks without CoMP. This process can be used during soft handover, instead of legacy hard handover mechanism.