Coalition Formation Games for Coordinated Service in Realistic Small Cell Propagation Topologies

The densification of modern wireless networks into a dense ecosystem of small cells imposes challenges for the reliable service and high quality of experience of its users as it can result into severe intercell interference, especially for users scattered on the cell edges. Joint Transmission Coordinated Multipoint (JT-CoMP) is a technique that can be deployed to form cooperating clusters of transmission points, enabling them to jointly transmit data to significantly mitigate this type of interference for these users. However, JT-CoMP stresses the backhaul links and radio resources are limited, meaning that, with incautious clustering, the data rates for cell edge users may not improve, while the data rates for the non-cell edge users may severely decrease. To tackle these drawbacks, a dynamic coalition formation algorithm is proposed to form the appropriate transmission point clusters to implement JT-CoMP. Furthermore, to ensure reliable service for all the network's users, the case where JT-CoMP is enhanced with the capability to serve users based on their selected application is examined. The proposed scheme's adaptability and capability to increase cell edge user throughput is then tested and compared to the non JT-CoMP case, a JT-CoMP scheme with static clustering and a JT-CoMP scheme with greedy clustering for a user mobility scenario. To obtain more reliable and accurate results of the JT-CoMP deployment, physical layer parameters retrieved from a fully deterministic physical layer radio planning tool (TruNET wireless) are imported for our simulations.