A Utility-Based Joint Resource Allocation Approach for Multi-Service in CoMP Networks

Coordinated multi-point (CoMP) joint transmission is considered as a key technique to mitigate inter-cell interference and improve the cell-edge performance in 3GPP LTE-Advanced. In this paper, a utility-based joint resource allocation approach is proposed to support CoMP joint transmission in orthogonal frequency division multiple access systems. Two different utility functions are considered with diverse quality of service provisioning. The objective is to maximize the sum utility of a clustered CoMP network, considering mixed real-time voice over IP (VoIP) and best-effort (BE) traffic patterns. A centralized joint resource allocation algorithm is proposed by decoupling the optimization problem into per-subchannel subproblems. Further more, a greedy user selection based low-complexity algorithm is proposed for practical implementation. For the sake of performance comparison, the proportional-fair based joint scheduling, as well as two non-coordinated scheduling schemes are also evaluated. Via system-level simulation we show that the proposed algorithms not only substantially improve the cell-edge spectrum efficiency of BE users, but also significantly decrease the packet drop ratio and call outage ratio of VoIP users.