Downlink CoMP transmission with multiple cooperating sets

Coordinated multi-point (CoMP) transmission has been considered in the multi-cell, multi-user system in the downlink where each remote radio equipment (RRE) unit transmits data stream(s) to all the user(s) in the CoMP system. CoMP transmission has been shown to improve the performance of the cell-edge users but the associated problem of high data and feedback overhead as well as complexity is still an issue for researchers. The main contribution in this paper is in reducing the data and feedback overhead as well as the complexity involved in designing the precoders at the transmitter or receiver through the use of multiple cooperating sets (CSs) in the CoMP system. We are able to show with our proposed cooperating set scheduling (CSS) algorithm, that we can select a subset of RREs to form multiple CSs in the system and still achieve good performance (as opposed to using the full set of RREs for CoMP transmission).