Cooperative scheduling, precoding, and optimized power allocation for LTE-advanced CoMP systems

Recent research has shown that coordinated multi-point (CoMP) transmission can provide significant gains in terms of overall throughput of cellular systems. The main purpose of this paper is to enhance the overall cell throughput and to optimize the power consumption in LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) systems using CoMP. In particular, we present scheduling, precoding and power allocation (PA) algorithms based on the signal-to-leakage-plus-noise-ratio (SLNR) for the CoMP downlink. The proposed scheduling and precoding algorithm selects the user equipment (UEs) that can efficiently share the same resource block (RB) without degrading the overall throughput by using the SLNR metric. Additionally, we propose PA algorithms that significantly improve the overall throughput and reduce the power consumption. The PA algorithms are based on solving a set of constrained convex optimization problems using the log-barrier function penalty method based on using the Newton method. We evaluate the proposed PA algorithms by comparing them to equal power allocation (EPA). Performance evaluation results show that the proposed SLNR-based PA algorithms provide considerable performance gains in terms of the overall system throughput and also are shown to have even less power consumption compared to the typical EPA.