A Coverage Area-Based CoMP Technique for SWIPT-Enabled Mobile Networks

The limited power resources for battery-operated mobile devices and the highly dense network deployment in the sixth generation networks make the simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) and coordinated multi-point transmission (CoMP) technologies ever more attractive. However, the CoMP suffers from the heavy handover signalling of high-velocity mobile users (MUs). In this paper, we propose a novel coverage area-based CoMP (CA-CoMP) scheme for SWIPT-enabled mobile networks, aiming at reducing the handover rate and enhancing the SWIPT performance. In particular, by taking into consideration the heterogeneity of base stations’ (BSs’) footprints, the CA-CoMP scheme enables a MU to select and communicate with multiple BSs, whose coverage areas are greater than a pre-defined threshold. By leveraging stochastic geometry tools, we study the CA-CoMP scheme in terms of several key performance metrics, i.e., inter- and intra-cell handover rate, success probabilities, average spectral efficiency, average harvested energy as well as energy efficiency. Our results reveal that the proposed CA-CoMP scheme achieves a much lower handover rate and offers a better SWIPT performance, compared to conventional CoMP schemes, e.g., a 41% improvement of the spectral efficiency can be achieved for MUs with a velocity of 25 m/s; while the optimal area threshold for achieving the best SWIPT performance is numerically evaluated.