On Performance Loss of Some CoMP Techniques under Channel Power Imbalance and Limited Feedback

Spatially distributed transmissions in coordinated multipoint (CoMP) systems can lead to mean channel power imbalance (CPI) at the receiver. Similar imbalance also occurs in distributed antenna and co-located multi-antenna systems due to inaccurate antenna calibration. This paper studies performance impact of power imbalance on some practical CoMP methods with limited feedback. We derive approximate analytical expressions of asymptotic capacity, optimal amplitude weights, as well as signal-to-noise ratio gain for a few methods under analysis. Numerical results validate the analysis and show impacts of erroneous feedback under CPI. Results demonstrate that CPI has significant negative impact on the CoMP performance. Furthermore, our results reveal that amplitude information at transmitter is crucial and detrimental effect of CPI can be effectively compensated by using long-term amplitude information at transmitter. Moreover, additional short-term amplitude feedback shows insignificant gain when a large number of diversity antennas in base stations or CoMP suffer from feedback errors. In fact, a sparsely quantized phase and long-term power information feedback can lead to performance very close to the use of full channel state information at the transmitter.