Performance Analysis of CoMP in Ultra-Dense Networks with Limited Backhaul Capacity

Coordinated multipoint (CoMP) transmission provides an effective way to mitigate inter-cell interference as well as improve network performance in ultra-dense networks (UDNs). However, applying coordination among access points (APs) requires high backhaul capacity (BC), which becomes a bottleneck for employing CoMP. Considering a downlink UDN with limited BC, this paper conducts performance analysis of two CoMP schemes including joint transmission (JT) and coordinated scheduling/beamforming (CS/CB) from three aspects: a typical user’s perspective, a typical AP’s perspective and a network perspective. Firstly, the coverage probability (CP) and ergodic capacity (EC) of a typical user are characterized. Secondly, per-AP backhaul consumption is explicitly quantified and the successful serving probability (SSP) of a typical AP is proposed to capture its robustness to limited BC. Additionally, we propound effective ergodic capacity (EEC) to consider performance gain and backhaul consumption simultaneously from a global perspective. Further, the approximated expressions of all the performance metrics are given so that the impact of cluster size and AP density can be overtly observed. Numerical results illustrate that JT outperforms CS/CB in the case of high BC threshold, small cluster size or high AP density and a comparative smaller size is preferable for both two schemes for practice.