Advanced coordinated multi-point techniques for wireless networks

The constantly increasing demand for wireless services, the scarcity of radio spectrum and the characteristics of the global wireless market, necessitate that future wireless systems provide higher peak data rates, better quality-of-service and are more spectrally efficient. A very promising technology that can achieve the aforementioned targets is Coordinated Multi-Point (CoMP). CoMP can mitigate inter-cell interference and augment data rates without sacrificing additional spectrum at the cost of increased overheads and costs. In CoMP systems, base stations (BSs) are grouped into cooperation clusters and the BSs of each cluster exchange information and jointly process signals. Unlike conventional cellular systems, users receive useful signals from several BSs. The aim of this thesis is to facilitate the incorporation of CoMP by practical systems. To this end, a number of advanced CoMP techniques are proposed that strike a very good balance between achievable performance, overheads and costs.