Multi-cell cooperation (MCC) mitigates intercell interference and improves
throughput at the cell edge. This paper considers a cooperative downlink,
whereby cell-edge mobiles are served by multiple cooperative base stations. The
cooperating base stations transmit identical signals over paths with
non-identical path losses, and the receiving mobile performs diversity
combining. The analysis in this paper is driven by a new expression for the
conditional outage probability when signals arriving over different paths are
combined in the presence of noise and interference, where the conditioning is
with respect to the network topology and shadowing. The channel model accounts
for path loss, shadowing, and Nakagami fading, and the Nakagami fading
parameters do not need to be identical for all paths. To study performance over
a wide class of network topologies, a random spatial model is adopted, and
performance is found by statistically characterizing the rates provided on the
downlinks. To model realistic networks, the model requires a minimum separation
among base stations. Having adopted a realistic model and an accurate analysis,
the paper proceeds to determine performance under several resource-allocation
policies and provides insight regarding how the cell edge should be defined.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, IEEE Global Telecommun. Conf. (GLOBECOM), 2013,
to appear. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1210.366