User grouping is employed to tradeoff the COMP forward link capacity and required reverse link feedback, which makes the design of COMP practical and flexible. A channel element, such as the large scale fading, is measured for each distributed transmitter and UE pair based on reference signals, and the network receives this information as feedback in the reverse link. The COMP determines a maximum cross interference level αreq that is affordable, based on the available reverse link capacity for feedback. If this maximum cross interference level αreq is exceeded, geographically separate UEs are divided into as few groups as possible, with UEs within each group separated, and the groups are allocated different time/frequency resource blocks. The grouping is done with the constraint that the cross interference does not exceed αreq.