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

Inter-cell interference mitigation in LTE-advanced heterogeneous mobile networks

Heterogeneous Networks are one of the most effective solutions for enhancing the network performance of mobile systems, by deploying small cells within the coverage of the ordinary Macro cells. The goals of deploying such networks are to offload data from the possibly congested Macro cells towards the small cells and to achieve enhancements for outdoor/ indoor coverage in a cost-effective way. Moreover, heterogeneous networks aim to maximise the system capacity and to provide lower interference by reducing the distance between the transmitter and the receiver. However, inter-cell interference is a major technical challenge in heterogeneous networks, which mainly affects system performance and may cause a significant degradation in network throughput (especially for the edge users) in co-channel deployment. So, to overcome the aforementioned problem, both researchers and telecommunication operators are required to develop effective approaches that adapt different mobile system scenarios. The research study presented in this thesis provides a novel interference mitigation scheme, based on power control and time-domain inter-cell interference coordination to improve cell and users’ throughputs. In addition, powerful scheduling algorithms have been developed and optimised to adapt the proposed scheme for both macro and small cells. It is responsible for the optimum resource allocation to minimise the inter-cell interference to the minimum ranges. The focus of this work is for downlink inter-cell interference in Long Term Evolution (LTE- Advanced) mobile networks, as an example of OFDMA (orthogonal frequency division multiple access)-based networks. More attention is paid to the Pico cell as an important cell type in heterogeneous deployment, due to the direct backhauling with the macro cell to coordinate the resource allocation among cells tightly and efficiently. The intensive simulations and results analyses show that the proposed scheme demonstrates better performance with less complexity in terms of user and cell throughputs, and spectral efficiency, as compared with the previously employed schem

D13.2 Techniques and performance analysis on energy- and bandwidth-efficient communications and networking

Deliverable D13.2 del projecte europeu NEWCOM#The report presents the status of the research work of the various Joint Research Activities (JRA) in WP1.3 and the results that were developed up to the second year of the project. For each activity there is a description, an illustration of the adherence to and relevance with the identified fundamental open issues, a short presentation of the main results, and a roadmap for the future joint research. In the Annex, for each JRA, the main technical details on specific scientific activities are described in detail.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

A Comparative Study of Resource Allocation Schemes in Heterogeneous Cellular Networks on the Downlink

Network densification through heterogeneous networks (HetNets) is considered as a promising paradigm to address the ever increasing mobile users’ data demands in 5G networks. A HetNet consists of macro cells (each with a macro base station) overlaid with a number of small cells (each with a low-power base station) and has been shown to significantly improve the network capacity when supported by carefully designed radio resource management (RRM) techniques. RRM is typically studied via a joint optimisation problem over three network processes, namely, resource allocation (RA), user association (UA) and user scheduling (US), and is the focus of this thesis. Our first objective is to characterise the optimal HetNet performance by jointly optimising these three processes through a unified framework under different channel deployment scenarios. Towards this, we focus on two RA schemes, namely, partially shared deployment (PSD) and co-channel deployment with almost blank subframes (ABS), proposed by 3GPP for future HetNets. In the first part of the thesis, we revisit a unified optimisation framework under PSD that allows us to configure the network parameters (e.g., number of channels per-cell and power per-channel) and allocate optimal throughputs to users in a fair manner. The framework under consideration is based on a snapshot model where, in each snapshot, the number of users and channel gains are assumed to be fixed and known. Although the previous study on this framework provides many interesting engineering insights, it is primarily based on two wrong assumptions in terms of channel modelling and US which we correct in our work. We also revisit a similar framework but under ABS and conduct a thorough comparative study between ABS and PSD. We first show that the U+03B1-fair scheduling problem under ABS is generally much more involved than that under PSD for U+03B1 U+2260 1. To verify whether the US complexities involved from deploying ABS are justifiable, we compare the throughput performance of the two schemes under a static setting, where the number of users in each snapshot is assumed to be fixed. Our results indicate that PSD outperforms ABS for different choices of U+03B1-fair and under different HetNet configurations. In the second part of the thesis, we further study our frameworks under a dynamic setting and continue our comparisons between the two RA schemes under different service-time models. The dynamic setting, as well as reaffirming the upper-hand of PSD, provides a number of new insights, most importantly the fact that the conventional physical-layer based UA schemes do not always work well. Motivated by this observation, we further explore the problem of UA under PSD with the objective of improving an existing online UA scheme. We show that when users are periodically triggered to re-associate (on an individual basis), the online UA scheme can significantly improve the system performance

Cooperation techniques between LTE in unlicensed spectrum and Wi-Fi towards fair spectral efficiency

On the road towards 5G, a proliferation of Heterogeneous Networks (HetNets) is expected. Sensor networks are of great importance in this new wireless era, as they allow interaction with the environment. Additionally, the establishment of the Internet of Things (IoT) has incredibly increased the number of interconnected devices and consequently the already massive wirelessly transmitted traffic. The exponential growth of wireless traffic is pushing the wireless community to investigate solutions that maximally exploit the available spectrum. Recently, 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) announced standards that permit the operation of Long Term Evolution (LTE) in the unlicensed spectrum in addition to the exclusive use of the licensed spectrum owned by a mobile operator. Alternatively, leading wireless technology developers examine standalone LTE operation in the unlicensed spectrum without any involvement of a mobile operator. In this article, we present a classification of different techniques that can be applied on co-located LTE and Wi-Fi networks. Up to today, Wi-Fi is the most widely-used wireless technology in the unlicensed spectrum. A review of the current state of the art further reveals the lack of cooperation schemes among co-located networks that can lead to more optimal usage of the available spectrum. This article fills this gap in the literature by conceptually describing different classes of cooperation between LTE and Wi-Fi. For each class, we provide a detailed presentation of possible cooperation techniques that can provide spectral efficiency in a fair manner