Joint Scheduling for CoMP and eICIC in Heterogeneous Network Deployments

In this paper, LTE Rel-10 eICIC, an advanced interference mitigation technique using semi-static coordination and DL CoMP techniques relying on dynamic scheduling are jointly applied in a heterogeneous network comprising of macro and low power nodes. It is shown that these algorithms, when applied jointly and if supported with appropriately designed feedback schemes, can provide complementary benefits and can significantly improve both system capacity and user experience in the network. Using covariance matrix feedback, we observe that the joint application of CoMP and eICIC can provide more than 20% system throughput improvement and more than 40% cell-edge throughput improvement that exceed the gains of either CoMP or eICIC applied individually.