Fairness-Aware Scheduling for Dynamic Point Selection in CoMP-Based Networks with Hotspots

To support high data rates, cells in mobile networks tend to be miniaturized, which exacerbates inter-cell interference. The coordinated multipoint (CoMP) technique makes a set of base stations (BSs) share channel state information of user equipments (UEs) to mitigate interference by coordinating their transmission. Such a set of BSs is known as a coordinated set (CoS). This paper focuses on dynamic point selection (DPS) in CoMP, which allows UEs to flexibly switch their serving BSs in a CoS, and studies a fair scheduling problem. The issue asks how to select BSs for allocating resources to UEs to improve fairness among UEs while maintaining high network throughput. To address this issue, the paper proposes a fairness-aware scheduling (FAS) scheme. In view that UEs may assemble in some small regions to form hotspots, FAS regulates the period length for UEs to switch BSs adaptively. Moreover, it uses different strategies for resource allocation based on cell situations. Simulation results reveal that the FAS scheme can significantly increase UE fairness and still keep high network throughput, as compared with existing solutions.