Buffer-Aware Scheduling and Power Allocation for CoMP Transmission With Large-Scale Antennas

Coordinated multipoint (CoMP) has received considerable attention as a promising technology to improve the transmission rates and spectral efficiency of cell edge users for future networks. How to design coordinated scheduling through a cross-layer approach is challenging in CoMP systems. In this paper, a pilot-efficient scheduling policy is presented in CoMP systems with large-scale antennas. Our policy selects users to access the spectrum and allocates the power to users based on the queue state information (QSI) and channel state information (CSI). Based on the Lyapunov optimization, the cross-layer scheduling problem can be modeled as a combinatorial optimization problem, which is nontrivial. To solve this problem, we decouple the combinatorial optimization problem as a user selection problem and a power allocation problem. Then a low-complexity iteration algorithm is proposed to solve the combinatorial optimization problem. Simulation results demonstrate that our presented policy has better performance over traditional methods. Moreover, by comparing to the exhaustive search algorithm, the performance of our proposed policy is similar to that of an optimal policy.