Effects of data traffic in Coordinated Multi-Point (CoMP) transmission and reception

With the tremendous growth in data usage in cellular networks, many operators and vendors are looking towards transmission schemes which enable high network efficiency under the interference limited environments. As one of the potential technology candidates, Coordinated Multi-Point (CoMP) Transmission, which mitigates or even exploits inter-cell interference, seems to give fairly promising performance gains. Since CoMP technology is still being developed, it has not been fully studied in consideration of the randomness of the data traffic and load imbalance among cell sites. This paper provides an analysis of the effects of practical data traffic pattern on candidate CoMP technologies under various deployment scenarios and summarizes some enhancement challenges for CoMP.