Cell-Edge User Satisfaction-Based Dynamic CoMP Clustering with Load Awareness in Ultra-Dense Networks

With the implementation of mobile communication systems in the 5G and beyond era, Ultra-Dense Networks (UDNs) deployment has been a dominant approach. A dense cell deployment offers high system capacity to serve an increasing demand for communication services. However, the system's performance highly depends on the interference coordination among neighboring cells. Under the concept of Coordinated Multipoint (CoMP) transmission, system throughput can be enhanced through base station dynamic coordination. Besides the technique for signal coordination from multiple Transmission Points (TP), another important issue is the selection approach for cell clustering. This work proposes a dynamic clustering mechanism called cell-edge user satisfaction-based dynamic CoMP clustering with load awareness, which considers cell-edge users’ performance as the main cell clustering criteria along with the load awareness for better load balance between cells. A numerical study has been performed to observe the system performance for the 5G Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) systems embedded with our proposed approach in comparison with the other two systems implementing the static clustering technique and the dynamic clustering with sum rate criteria. Better system performance offered by our proposed technique is illustrated via the numerical results in terms of system throughput, fairness, spectrum efficiency, and number of unsatisfied users for different test scenarios.