Radio Resource Management of CoMP System in HetNet under Power and Backhaul Constraints

Recently, Heterogeneous Network (HetNet) with Coordinated Multi-Point (CoMP) scheme is introduced into Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) systems to improve digital services for User Equipments (UEs), especially for cell-edge UEs. However, Radio Resource Management (RRM), including Resource Block (RB) scheduling and Power Allocation (PA), in this scenario becomes challenging, due to the intercell cooperation. In this paper, we investigate the RRM problem for downlink transmission of HetNet system with Joint Processing (JP) CoMP (both joint transmission and dynamic cell selection schemes), aiming at maximizing weighted sum data rate under the constraints of both transmission power and backhaul capacity. First, joint RB scheduling and PA problem is formulated as a constrained Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) which is NP-hard. To simplify the formulation problem, we decompose it into two problems of RB scheduling and PA. For RB scheduling, we propose an algorithm with less computational complexity to achieve a suboptimal solution. Then, according to the obtained scheduling results, we present an iterative Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) method to solve the PA problem. Extensive simulations are conducted to verify the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithms. Two kinds of JP CoMP schemes are compared with a non-CoMP greedy scheme (max capacity scheme). Simulation results prove that the CoMP schemes with the proposed RRM algorithms dramatically enhance data rate of cell-edge UEs, thereby improving UEs' fairness of data rate. Also, it is shown that the proposed PA algorithms can decrease power consumption of transmission antennas without loss of transmission performance.