On Scheduling and Power Control in Multi-Cell Coordinated Clusters

Recently, tight network coordination in cellular systems has been demonstrated to improve the spectrum efficiency by means of signal processing methods. However, the performance of signal processing based multi-cell coordination is sensitive to backhaul delays, channel estimation errors and imperfections in fast link control. In this paper we consider tight network coordination for fast radio resource management (RRM) including packet scheduling, power control and modulation and coding scheme selection. We use a system level simulator to analyze the uplink performance of a multi-cell coordinated system that is built around a fast backhaul transport infrastructure for the purpose of enabling coordinated RRM rather than coordinated signal processing. We find that coordinated RRM alone can provide significant performance gains, up to 50% for cell edge and cell capacity as compared to traditional single-cell configurations and that multi-cell fast power control and modulation and coding scheme selection can significantly improve the accuracy of link adaptation in terms of signal-to-interference-and-noise (SINR) distribution, while imposing lower demands on the capacities of backhaul links compared to coordinated signal processing. Therefore RRM coordination can be an efficient complement to coordinated signal processing in multi-cell coordinated clusters.