  Mobile users (or UEs, to use 3GPP terminology) served by small cells in dense
urban settings may abruptly experience a significant deterioration in their
channel to their serving base stations (BSs) in several scenarios, such as
after turning a corner around a tall building, or a sudden knot of traffic
blocking the direct path between the UE and its serving BS. In this work, we
propose a scheme to temporarily increase the data rate to/from this UE with
additional bandwidth from the nearest Coordinated Multi-Point (CoMP) cluster of
BSs, while the slower process of handover of the UE to a new serving BS is
ongoing. We emphasize that this additional bandwidth is additional to the data
rates the UE is getting over its primary connection to the current serving BS
and, after the handover, to the new serving BS. The key novelty of the present
work is the proposal of a decentralized market-based resource allocation method
to perform resource allocation to support Coordinated Beamforming (CB) CoMP. It
is scalable to large numbers of UEs and BSs, and it is fast because resource
allocations are made bilaterally, between BSs and UEs. Once the resource
allocation to the UE has been made, the coordinated of transmissions occurs as
per the usual CB methods. Thus the proposed method has the benefit of giving
the UE access to its desired amount of resources fast, without waiting for
handover to complete, or reporting channel state information before it knows
the resources it will be allocated for receiving transmissions from the serving
BS.
