Enhancing Fairness by Iterative Radio Resource Splitting and User Grouping for CoMP

Coordinated operation from multiple transmission points in cellular networks in terms of joint transmission has from the beginning been an essential component in the design of 4G and 5G mobile radio networks. Next to issues related to channel state estimation, precoding and transmission point clustering, the corresponding dynamic resource allocation in mixed scenarios consisting of mobile devices served via either joint transmission or single-point transmission is an important and challenging task that has to be addressed by network operators. In this paper, we propose a new heuristic iterative resource splitting and user grouping concept for providing significant user data rate gains in typical downlink joint transmission scenarios while at the same time providing satisfying degrees of data rate fairness between all users in such a scenario, including single-point transmission users that do not utilize joint transmission. The proposed strategy is evaluated by means of Monte Carlo simulations for an exemplary LTE deployment scenario. The results exhibit distinct performance gains in comparison with a reference strategy that has been presented in a previous research paper.