Affiliation Macrocell Switching of Picocells in Uplink for Distributed Antenna System

This paper proposes the affiliation macrocell switching of picocells in a distributed antenna system (DAS). In a conventional DAS, a macrocell is composed of a fixed number of picocells. On the other hand, in the proposed scheme, picocells can switch their affiliation to adjacent macrocells so that the throughputs of cell-edge users improve. The proposed scheme aims to improve a system throughput with the moderate increase of backhaul complexity. Numerical results obtained through computer simulation show that the proposed scheme improves the system throughput by approximately 0.3 bps/Hz/cell and maintains user fairness. Moreover, the system throughput improves regardless of the distance between distributed antennas.