Abstract
Coordinated multi-point (CoMP) transmission is a promising technique for improving spectral efficiency and overall system throughput in future cellular communication systems. This study investigates the downlink performance of relay-assisted CoMP transmissions. The non-ideal transceiver scenario that considers the effects of hardware impairments on the performance of CoMP transmission is presented. The performance of relay-assisted CoMP transmission using a hybrid opportunistic cooperative (HOC) protocol is evaluated and compared for two different CoMP transmission strategies: coordinated beam-forming and joint processing (JP). For each strategy, the performance in terms of outage probability, average sum rate and throughput is studied. The non-COMP strategy is also included for comparison. Both theoretical and simulation results are considered to test the performance of ideal and practical scenarios of both CoMP transmission using HOC protocol and other relaying protocols such as amplify-and-forward (AF) and decode-and-forward (DF) protocols. The obtained results show that the HOC protocol with ideal scenario, significantly improves the average sum rate, the net throughput and the outage probability of CoMP transmission especially when considering the JP strategy. The obtained results also indicate that, the performance degradation due to non-ideal transceiver with HOC protocol is small when compared with AF and DF protocols.