Coordinated multipoint joint transmission with relaxed backhaul requirements

A method for coordinated multipoint transmission includes collecting, in a serving CoMP-MA, channel state information, CSIs, reported by terminals served by eNBs within a cooperating set. The serving CoMP-MA selects dominant interferers as candidate transmitting eNBs for a terminal. CoMP joint transmission is initiated by forwarding, to the candidate transmitting eNBs, PDCP PDUs received from SGW and targeted to the selected terminal, and by setting the status of the terminal to joint transmission. High and low thresholds of PDCP buffers of the serving CoMP-MA are adjusted. As information required for air interface scheduling becomes available, the method includes extracting, in the serving CoMP-MA, radio resource allocations, RLC and MAC headers, references to user plane data, and precoding matrices from protocol entities, and forwarding them to the transmitting eNBs that have acknowledged PDCP PDUs, in order the transmitting CoMP-MA to prepare air interface for the terminal.