No blind spot: Network coverage enhancement through joint cooperation and frequency reuse

Both coordinated multi-point transmission and frequency reuse are effective approaches to mitigate inter-cell interference and improve network coverage. The motivation of this work is to explore the manner to effectively utilize the spectrum resource by reasonably combining cooperation and frequency reuse. The Matern cluster process, which is appropriate to model networks with hot spots, is used to model the spatial distribution of base stations. Two cooperative mechanisms, coherent and non-coherent joint transmission (JT), are analyzed and compared. We also evaluate the effect of multiple antennas and imperfect channel state information. The simulation reveals that the proposed approach to combine cooperation and frequency reuse is effective to improve the network coverage for users located at both the center and the boundary of the cooperative region.