Analytical Modeling of Downlink CoMP in LTE-Advanced

International audienceIn this paper, we discuss several Coordinated Multi-Point (CoMP) schemes proposed for LTE-Advanced systems. We investigate their benefits in a multi-antenna beamforming system where multiple cells may share their resources and jointly coordinate their transmissions to improve the performance at cell edge and the overall system capacity. We evaluate the system performance by combining flow-level analysis with numerical results from LTE-Advanced network simulator. We show that the intra-site coordination brings significant gains in beamforming systems, especially with the joint transmission scheme where the user throughput and the system capacity are improved