Interactive CoMP Clustering for Load Balancing and Time Synchronization

This work aims to address the timing synchronization issue which limits the applicability of coordinated multipoint schemes, specifically joint transmission, in practical wireless networks. Following a brief description of the issue itself, and its repercussions on the network performance, the various conditions/solutions that mitigate this problem are recapped. Following this, we provide the background of the proposed approach to be used for mitigating the timing synchronization issues, namely, common cyclic prefix (CP) technique. Then, a clustering algorithm is proposed aimed at balancing the cell load with timing synchronization as a constraint. In load balancing stage, the first priority is given to users with higher received power and lower number of base stations in the candidate set. The results obtained via simulations indicate that heterogeneous network (HetNet) deployments suffer from timing synchronization when smaller CP duration is used, and this performance degradation can be resolved quite effectively using the common CP configuration.