An overlapped clustering scheme of coordinated multi-point transmission for LTE-A systems

In this paper, we propose an overlapped clustering scheme to decide the cooperation cells for coordinated multi-point (CoMP) systems. In the scenario of joint processing of CoMP, the cooperated cells jointly transmit for users so the inter-cell interference among the cooperation cells are eliminated. However, the cluster-edge users suffer from the inter-cluster interference. The overlapping patterns are defined for the cluster-edge users to make sure that these users become the overlapping cluster-center users. Then the overlapping patterns and clusters are allocated orthogonal frequency resource, which can cancel inter-cluster interference and improve the performance of cell-edge users. Simulation results show that the proposed overlapped clustering scheme yields significant improvement to cell-edge users' spectrum efficiency as well as increasing average cell throughput.