Joint Scheduling for CoMP and eICIC in Heterogeneous Network Deployments

In this paper, LTE Rel-10 eICIC, an advanced interference mitigation technique using semi-static coordina-tion and DL CoMP techniques relying on dynamic schedul-ing are jointly applied in a heterogeneous network compris-ing of macro and low power nodes. It is shown that these algorithms, when applied jointly and if supported with ap-propriately designed feedback schemes, can provide com-plementary benefits and can significantly improve both sys-tem capacity and user experience in the network. Using co-variance matrix feedback, we observe that the joint applica-tion of CoMP and eICIC can provide more than 20% system throughput improvement and more than 40% cell-edge throughput improvement that exceed the gains of either CoMP or eICIC applied individually.