Field Trial Results on Different Uplink Coordinated Multi-Point (CoMP) Concepts in Cellular Systems

Coordinated multi-point (CoMP) in the cellular uplink appears to be an effective option to combat inter-cell interference, offering large improvements in spectral efficiency and fairness. However, one major drawback of these schemes is that they typically require a large extent of additional backhaul infrastructure compared to a non-cooperative system. A large amount of theoretical work has been published on this topic, emphasizing the benefit of adapting between different CoMP strategies depending on the channel realization in order to optimize the rate/backhaul trade-off. This paper complements previous publications through field trial results obtained in a representative urban setup. The results yield an insight into practical issues connected to some schemes, while being fairly correlated to theoretical predictions and in fact further emphasizing the gain of adaptive CoMP.