Energy-aware clustering of CoMP-DPS transmission points

The main idea behind CoMP operation is to efficiently coordinate multiple transmission points to provide better transmission quality and QoS, while improving spectral efficiency. This concept can be extended to the heterogeneous networking environment of 5G systems and is expected to be one of the key technologies of the future. In this work, we focus on the CoMP transmission with Dynamic Point Selection (DPS) due to its low complexity and the gains it can offer to the reduction of the size of the clusters and to the network's power consumption. Therefore, in this paper, we present an Energy-Aware Clustering (EnAC) scheme to be utilized with CoMP-DPS in LTE-A. The goal of the proposed scheme is to reduce, as much as possible, the power consumption at each BS of a cluster without compromising the CoMP operation. In other words, we incorporate energy-related parameters into the CoMP clustering procedure aiming to raise the energy awareness of the overall system. These parameters are thoroughly studied and fine-tuned through simulation results which prove the energy efficiency of the proposed scheme.