Large Scale Field Trial Results on Uplink CoMP with Multi Antenna Base Stations

Coordinated Multi-Point (CoMP) appears to be an effective option to combat inter-cell interference in mobile communications. Previous field trials for uplink CoMP have shown that large improvements in spectral efficiency and fairness that are promised by theoretical work can also be achieved in real-world scenarios. However, these results only consider systems with single antenna base stations. We extend this work by presenting field trial results for a system with multi antenna base stations, and we show that this change of the system setup has a strong impact not only on the throughput but also on the relative performance of a cooperative compared to a non-cooperative system. Based on the presented results suggestions for further research and field trials are derived.