Performance evaluation of intra-site coordination schemes in cellular networks

In this work, we develop performance evaluation models for some intra-site coordination schemes in cellular networks, with a focus on Multi-flow transmission in HSPA+. We first focus on a static scheme where coordination is always performed for all users in the overlapping region of two cells. Through the analysis of a flow-level model, we show that this scheme indeed improves the cell-edge throughput at low loads but may make the system unstable at high loads, due to the suboptimal allocation of radio resources. We notice also that these results are very sensitive to the coordination threshold. We thus investigate a dynamic scheme which performs coordination according to resource availability in the site and show that this scheme outperforms the static one at all traffic loads independently of the coordination threshold. Additional results demonstrate an efficient load balancing ability across cells. We finally analyze how our models extend to the case of opportunistic scheduling schemes, like Proportional Fair, and show the impact of these schemes on the coordination gains.