WIRELESS COMMUNICATION WITH CO-OPERATING CELLS

摘要

In an LTE-based wireless communication system, each channel such as a control channel PDCCH is transmitted to the UE from one serving cell (the primary cell or Pcell). At the cell border the Pcell suffers from increased interference from neighbouring cells and typically a lower effective transmission rate is used to increase robustness to interference, for both data and control channel. Also, neighbouring cells are typically given different cell IDs, which can be used as a basis for distinguishing transmissions from different cells, even if radio frames are time-aligned. The invention modifies the control channel operation by arranging a common mapping of transmitted symbols to control channel resources in two different cells so that the same control channel message (P) or part of the message can be transmitted jointly from the two cells ((a),(b)), avoiding resources used in the cells for respective reference signals (R). This can be used to improve control channel reception at the cell border, without using more control channel resources. This would be beneficial in both normal system operation and also for Co-operative Multi-Point (CoMP) operation, e.g. using joint transmission techniques for data.