Power Delay Profile in Coordinated Distributed Networks: User-Centric v/s Disjoint Clustering

Power delay profiles (PDPs) are an important factor in the design of wireless networks, e.g., in choosing the length of a cyclic prefix. While distributed networks are receiving increasing attention, the impact of cooperation on the PDP has not been addressed. We address this issue in this paper. Specifically, we analyze a network where each user is served by a cluster of Remote Radio Heads (RRHs) with RRH locations modeled as a Poisson point process. We compare and contrast user-centric (where the serving RRHs are in a circle centered at the user) and the disjoint clustering (where the network is partitioned into fixed regions and all users within a region are served by all RRHs in the same region). Our analysis provides effective tools for the design of distributed networks illustrating the benefits of user-centric clustering in both power and delay metrics.