Centralized and distributed schedulers for non-coherent joint transmission

TL;DR

This paper compares centralized and distributed scheduling schemes for different non-coherent joint transmission methods in 5G NR indoor scenarios, highlighting their performance and implications for 5G network design.

Contribution

It provides a systematic evaluation of three network coordination schemes with different scheduling strategies in 5G NR indoor environments.

Findings

Distributed schemes like NF-NCJT perform reasonably well.

Different schemes require varying levels of user data and CSI exchange.

Implications for 5G architecture design are discussed.

Abstract

This paper studies the performance of three typical network coordination schemes, i.e., dynamic point selection, fully overlapped non-coherent joint transmission (F-NCJT), and nonfully overlapped NCJT (NF-NCJT), in 3GPP new radio (NR) in indoor scenarios via system level simulation. Each of these schemes requires a different level of user data and channel state information (CSI) report exchange among coordinated transmission reception points (TRPs) depending on centralized or distributed schedulers. Scheduling strategies of these network coordination schemes are briefly discussed. It has been demonstrated that distributed network coordination schemes (e.g., NFNCJT) can still perform reasonably well; a result which has important implications to the design of the fifth generation (5G) cellular network architecture.