  Coordinated Multipoint (CoMP) promised substantial throughput gain for
next-generation cellular systems. However, realizing this gain is costly in
terms of pilots and backhaul bandwidth, and may require substantial
modifications in physicallayer hardware. Targeting efficient throughput gain,
we develop a novel coordinated power control scheme for uplink cellular
networks called Checks and Balances (C&B), which checks the received signal
strength of one user and its generated interference to neighboring base
stations, and balances the two. C&B has some highly attractive advantages: C&B
(i) can be implemented easily in software, (ii) does not require to upgrade
non-CoMP physicallayer hardware, (iii) allows for fully distributed
implementation for each user equipment (UE), and (iv) does not need extra
pilots or backhaul communications. We evaluate the throughput performance of
C&B on an uplink LTE system-level simulation platform, which is carefully
calibrated with Huawei. Our simulation results show that C&B achieves much
better throughput performance, compared to several widely-used power control
schemes.
