User Pairing and Resource Allocation for Opportunistic CoMP in 5G CRAN

Cloud radio access network (C-RAN) is a key technology of 5G cellular networks. While a C-RAN collaboratively manages a pool of collaborative Baseband units (BBUs), user equipment (UEs) locating in the interference range of remote radio units (RRUs) would interfere with each other. To enhance spectrum efficiency, Coordinated Multipoint (CoMP) has been proposed to enable network MIMO and suppress inter-cell interference. However, channel estimation from collisions requires perfect alignment of resource allocation for CoMP and can never be perfect, thereby lowering the rate of MIMO equalization. To resolve the above issues, we propose to opportunistically enable CoMP based on dynamic traffic demands and explicitly allocate resources with consideration of the alignment constraint introduced by channel estimation from collisions. Our simulations show that adaptive resource allocation for opportunistic CoMP improves the overall throughput by up to 33.1% and 12.6% as compared to naive muting and CoMP allocation.