455 research outputs found
Fundamentals of Inter-cell Overhead Signaling in Heterogeneous Cellular Networks
Heterogeneous base stations (e.g. picocells, microcells, femtocells and
distributed antennas) will become increasingly essential for cellular network
capacity and coverage. Up until now, little basic research has been done on the
fundamentals of managing so much infrastructure -- much of it unplanned --
together with the carefully planned macro-cellular network. Inter-cell
coordination is in principle an effective way of ensuring different
infrastructure components behave in a way that increases, rather than
decreases, the key quality of service (QoS) metrics. The success of such
coordination depends heavily on how the overhead is shared, and the rate and
delay of the overhead sharing. We develop a novel framework to quantify
overhead signaling for inter-cell coordination, which is usually ignored in
traditional 1-tier networks, and assumes even more importance in multi-tier
heterogeneous cellular networks (HCNs). We derive the overhead quality contour
for general K-tier HCNs -- the achievable set of overhead packet rate, size,
delay and outage probability -- in closed-form expressions or computable
integrals under general assumptions on overhead arrivals and different overhead
signaling methods (backhaul and/or wireless). The overhead quality contour is
further simplified for two widely used models of overhead arrivals: Poisson and
deterministic arrival process. This framework can be used in the design and
evaluation of any inter-cell coordination scheme. It also provides design
insights on backhaul and wireless overhead channels to handle specific overhead
signaling requirements.Comment: 21 pages, 9 figure
Recommended from our members
Interference management and decentralized channel access schemes in hotspot-aided cellular networks
A system and method are provided wherein one or more femtocell base stations are deployed within a range of a cellular base station and utilize substantially the same frequency band as the cellular base station. Each femtocell base station may be configured to employ one or more interference avoidance techniques such that coexistence between the cellular and the corresponding femtocell base station is enabled. The interference avoidance techniques employed may include use of randomized time or frequency hopping; randomly selecting a predetermined number, or identifying one or more unutilized, frequency subchannels for signal transmission; using two or more transmit and two or more receive antennas; nulling one or more transmissions in a direction of a nearby cellular base station user; handing off at least one cellular user to one of the femtocell base stations and vice versa; and/or reducing the transmission power of at least one femtocell base station.Board of Regents, University of Texas Syste
Modeling Heterogeneous Network Interference Using Poisson Point Processes
Cellular systems are becoming more heterogeneous with the introduction of low
power nodes including femtocells, relays, and distributed antennas.
Unfortunately, the resulting interference environment is also becoming more
complicated, making evaluation of different communication strategies
challenging in both analysis and simulation. Leveraging recent applications of
stochastic geometry to analyze cellular systems, this paper proposes to analyze
downlink performance in a fixed-size cell, which is inscribed within a weighted
Voronoi cell in a Poisson field of interferers. A nearest out-of-cell
interferer, out-of-cell interferers outside a guard region, and cross-tier
interference are included in the interference calculations. Bounding the
interference power as a function of distance from the cell center, the total
interference is characterized through its Laplace transform. An equivalent
marked process is proposed for the out-of-cell interference under additional
assumptions. To facilitate simplified calculations, the interference
distribution is approximated using the Gamma distribution with second order
moment matching. The Gamma approximation simplifies calculation of the success
probability and average rate, incorporates small-scale and large-scale fading,
and works with co-tier and cross-tier interference. Simulations show that the
proposed model provides a flexible way to characterize outage probability and
rate as a function of the distance to the cell edge.Comment: Submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, July 2012,
Revised December 201
Enhanced Inter-Cell Interference Coordination Challenges in Heterogeneous Networks
3GPP LTE-Advanced has started a new study item to investigate Heterogeneous
Network (HetNet) deployments as a cost effective way to deal with the
unrelenting traffic demand. HetNets consist of a mix of macrocells, remote
radio heads, and low-power nodes such as picocells, femtocells, and relays.
Leveraging network topology, increasing the proximity between the access
network and the end-users, has the potential to provide the next significant
performance leap in wireless networks, improving spatial spectrum reuse and
enhancing indoor coverage. Nevertheless, deployment of a large number of small
cells overlaying the macrocells is not without new technical challenges. In
this article, we present the concept of heterogeneous networks and also
describe the major technical challenges associated with such network
architecture. We focus in particular on the standardization activities within
the 3GPP related to enhanced inter-cell interference coordination.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures, 2 table
On Imperfect CSI for the Downlink of a Two-Tier Network
International audienceIn this paper, we consider a hierarchical two-tier cellular network where a macrocell is overlaid with a tier of randomly distributed femtocells. We evaluate the combined effect of uncoordinated cross-tier interference, feedback delay, and quantization errors on the achievable rate of transmit beamforming with imperfect channel state information (CSI). We model the femtocell spatial distribution as a Poisson point process (PPP) and the temporal correlation of the channel according to a Gauss-Markov model. Using stochastic geometry tools, we derive the probability of outage at the macrocell users as a function of the temporal correlation, the femtocell density, and the feedback rate. We compute the maximum average achievable rate on the downlink of the macrocell network using a properly designed rate backoff scheme. We show that transmit beamforming with imperfect CSI is a viable option for the downlink of a two-tier cellular network, and that rate backoff recovers the loss in rate due to packet outage
A decentralized spectrum allocation and partitioning scheme for a two-tier macro-femtocell network with downlink beamforming
This article examines spectrum allocation and partitioning schemes to mitigate cross-tier interference under downlink beamforming environments. The enhanced SIR owing to beamforming allows more femtocells to share their spectrum with the macrocell and accordingly improves overall spectrum efficiency. We first design a simplified centralized scheme as the optimum and then propose a practical decentralized algorithm that determines which femtocells to use the full or partitioned spectrum with acceptable control overhead. To exploit limited information of the received signal strength efficiently, we consider two types of probabilistic femtocell base station (HeNB) selection policies. They are equal selection and interference weighted selection policies, and we drive their outage probabilities for a macrocell user. Through performance evaluation, we demonstrate that the outage probability and the cell capacity in our decentralized scheme are significantly better than those in a conventional cochannel deployment scheme. Furthermore, we show that the cell utility in our proposed scheme is close to that in the centralized scheme and better than that in the spectrum partitioning scheme with a fixed ratio.open0
Modeling and Analysis of K-Tier Downlink Heterogeneous Cellular Networks
Cellular networks are in a major transition from a carefully planned set of
large tower-mounted base-stations (BSs) to an irregular deployment of
heterogeneous infrastructure elements that often additionally includes micro,
pico, and femtocells, as well as distributed antennas. In this paper, we
develop a tractable, flexible, and accurate model for a downlink heterogeneous
cellular network (HCN) consisting of K tiers of randomly located BSs, where
each tier may differ in terms of average transmit power, supported data rate
and BS density. Assuming a mobile user connects to the strongest candidate BS,
the resulting Signal-to-Interference-plus-Noise-Ratio (SINR) is greater than 1
when in coverage, Rayleigh fading, we derive an expression for the probability
of coverage (equivalently outage) over the entire network under both open and
closed access, which assumes a strikingly simple closed-form in the high SINR
regime and is accurate down to -4 dB even under weaker assumptions. For
external validation, we compare against an actual LTE network (for tier 1) with
the other K-1 tiers being modeled as independent Poisson Point Processes. In
this case as well, our model is accurate to within 1-2 dB. We also derive the
average rate achieved by a randomly located mobile and the average load on each
tier of BSs. One interesting observation for interference-limited open access
networks is that at a given SINR, adding more tiers and/or BSs neither
increases nor decreases the probability of coverage or outage when all the
tiers have the same target-SINR.Comment: IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, vol. 30, no. 3, pp.
550 - 560, Apr. 201
- âŠ