Energy Efficiency of Combined DPS and JT CoMP Technique in Downlink LTE-A Cellular Networks

Coordinated multi-point (CoMP) transmission introduced by long-term evolution-advanced (LTE-A) cellular systems has shown great promise for improving network spectral efficiency (SE). On the other hand, the ever increasing energy consumption in cellular systems has emerged as a major concern for the network operators. This paper proposes a novel CoMP technique for the downlink of two-tier heterogeneous LTE-A cellular networks and investigates its energy efficiency (EE) performance. The proposed CoMP technique combines both dynamic point selection (DPS) and joint transmission (JT) CoMP schemes for improving network SE. Thus, under the proposed CoMP technique, multiple transmitting base stations (BSs) selected dynamically from the available high-power macrocells and low-power small cells are coordinated for jointly serving a user. Various spatial distributions of small cells in the macrocell coverage area are considered. A Poisson distributed hard core point process (HCPP) is also used for maintaining a minimum distance between any two of the small cells. Extensive simulations are carried out for evaluating the EE performance of cellular networks deployed integrating the proposed CoMP technique. Network performance is also compared with that of non-COMP, only JT and only DPS transmission scheme based cellular networks