Abstract

The coordinated multiple-point (CoMP) transmission technique recently has been considered as an efficient method to achieve energy-efficient cellular wireless communications and enhance cell-edge user performance. Conventional energy-efficient power allocation in CoMP is based simply on water filling (WF) without considering frequency diversity (different base station clustering and user scheduling results in each subband). For the single-antenna scenario without the involvement of precoding, we have recently proposed a noncooperative power game (PG) mechanism with pricing for power allocation as an interference coordination method to improve energy efficiency and throughput performance. In this paper, we generalize the noncooperative pricing game mechanism with pricing across both frequency and space in the scenario of multiuser multiple-input–multiple-output-based CoMP transmissions. First, a block diagonalization precoding-based CoMP transmission system is reformulated as multiple single-antenna transmit–receive pairs from a viewpoint of streams. Second, taking frequency diversity into account, we propose a novel WF power-allocation algorithm to provide the power strategy space (the range of power of streams), based on which PG in each stream is further proposed. Thus, the noncooperative PG with pricing can be executed in all streams. Extensive simulation results then demonstrate the effectiveness of the new proposal.