Joint Scheduling and Resource Allocation with Fairness Based on the Signal-to-Leakage-plus-Noise Ratio in the Downlink of CoMP Systems

Recent research has shown that Coordinated Multi Point (CoMP) transmission can provide significant gains in terms of the overall cell capacity and cell-edge user throughput [1]. The main purpose of this paper is to enhance the overall cell throughput, the cell-edge user’s throughput, and the fairness among user equipment terminals (UEs) in LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) systems using CoMP. Towards that end, we propose two novel Resource Allocation (RA) strategies based on the Signal-to-Leakage-plus-Noise-Ratio (SLNR) for the downlink of CoMP transmission in LTE-A systems. The proposed RA strategies select the UEs that can efficiently share the same resource block (RB) without degrading the overall throughput by using the SLNR metric. Moreover, a fairness algorithm is proposed to achieve certain level of fairness among the UEs and to improve the cell-edge UEs throughput. In addition, we compare the proposed strategies to the RA based on the more common Signal-to-Interference-plus-Noise-Ratio (SINR) strategy. The SLNR-based RA is shown to provide significant gains in throughput reaching up to 80% in the overall system and is shown to have even less complexity than the typical SINR-based RA. Moreover, by evaluating the proposed strategies in terms of the average cell throughput, cell-edge user throughput, and fairness among UEs, simulations show that the proposed strategies present superior performance compared to the more common SINR strategy. With such advantages as enhanced throughput and lower complexity, the proposed schemes are suitable for application in practical cellular systems.