Interference management for future cellular OFDMA systems using coordinated multi-point transmission

Todays cellular systems reach their limits for data rate due to the continuously increasing amount of subscribers using wireless service for business purposes or in leisure time (smartphone effect). Thus, recent research focuses on concepts for interference management for cellular OFDMA systems. This paper addresses various techniques related to this topic, while considering the concepts with lowest complexity and backhaul costs as promising candidates to be applied first. Starting from interference canceling receivers over multi-user MIMO using fixed precoding to multi-cell interference estimation, which improves the precision of link adaptation, we discuss closed-loop cooperative transmit beamforming using multiple base stations grouped into a wireless distributed network (WDN), which is denoted as coordinated multi-point joint transmission in the 3GPP LTE-Advanced standardization. It is obvious, the more sophisticated these techniques are, the higher the demands for feedback and backhaul become. Performance results are provided by employing multi-cell simulations according to recommendations from 3GPP. In addition, feasibility of coordinated multi-point joint transmission is demonstrated in a real-time prototype setup, i.e. in the Berlin LTE-Advance Testbed.