Power imbalance induced BER performance loss under limited-feedback CoMP techniques

Coordinated multipoint (CoMP) technology utilizes simultaneous transmission/reception from/to different access points, and it is considered as an important feature to exploit and/or mitigate intercell interference in fourth-generation mobile networks. Yet, channel power imbalance at the receiver is experienced in CoMP systems due to, e.g., spatially distributed transmissions. Traditional co-located multi-antenna systems may also experience power imbalance among antenna branches due to inaccurate antenna calibration. This paper presents a bit error rate (BER) analysis and derives asymptotic and approximate BER expressions for some practical CoMP transmission techniques under channel power imbalance. Besides the analytical results, numerical analysis is made to thoroughly capture the performance impact of channel power imbalance on the performance gain of the CoMP methods. The results demonstrate that power imbalance considerably affects BER performance and applying long-term amplitude information with fast phase feedback has insignificant benefit to effectively compensate the detrimental effect of large channel power imbalance when base stations use a single antenna. In this case, exploiting both short-term amplitude and phase information is a very good choice. On the contrary, for a large number of diversity antennas in base stations, using long-term amplitude information with a sparsely quantized phase shows BER performance close to the case where full channel state information is applied.