On Providing Downlink Services in Collocated Spectrum-Sharing Macro and Femto Networks

Femtocells have been considered by the wireless industry as a cost-effective solution not only to improve indoor service providing, but also to unload traffic from already overburdened macro networks. Due to spectrum availability and network infrastructure considerations, a macro network may have to share spectrum with overlaid femtocells. In spectrum-sharing macro and femto networks, inter-cell interference caused by different transmission powers of macrocell base stations (MBS) and femtocell access points (FAP), in conjunction with potentially densely deployed femtocells, may create dead spots where reliable services cannot be guaranteed to either macro or femto users. In this paper, based on a thorough analysis of downlink (DL) outage probabilities (OP) of collocated spectrum-sharing orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) based macro and femto networks, we devise a decentralized strategy for an FAP to self-regulate its transmission power level and usage of radio resources depending on its distance from the closest MBS. Simulation results show that the derived closed-form lower bounds of DL OPs are tight, and the proposed decentralized femtocell self-regulation strategy is able to guarantee reliable DL services in targeted macro and femto service areas while providing superior spatial reuse, for even a large number of spectrum-sharing femtocells deployed per cell site

Interference mitigation in cognitive femtocell networks

“A thesis submitted to the University of Bedfordshire, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy”.Femtocells have been introduced as a solution to poor indoor coverage in cellular communication which has hugely attracted network operators and stakeholders. However, femtocells are designed to co-exist alongside macrocells providing improved spatial frequency reuse and higher spectrum efficiency to name a few. Therefore, when deployed in the two-tier architecture with macrocells, it is necessary to mitigate the inherent co-tier and cross-tier interference. The integration of cognitive radio (CR) in femtocells introduces the ability of femtocells to dynamically adapt to varying network conditions through learning and reasoning. This research work focuses on the exploitation of cognitive radio in femtocells to mitigate the mutual interference caused in the two-tier architecture. The research work presents original contributions in mitigating interference in femtocells by introducing practical approaches which comprises a power control scheme where femtocells adaptively controls its transmit power levels to reduce the interference it causes in a network. This is especially useful since femtocells are user deployed as this seeks to mitigate interference based on their blind placement in an indoor environment. Hybrid interference mitigation schemes which combine power control and resource/scheduling are also implemented. In a joint threshold power based admittance and contention free resource allocation scheme, the mutual interference between a Femtocell Access Point (FAP) and close-by User Equipments (UE) is mitigated based on admittance. Also, a hybrid scheme where FAPs opportunistically use Resource Blocks (RB) of Macrocell User Equipments (MUE) based on its traffic load use is also employed. Simulation analysis present improvements when these schemes are applied with emphasis in Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks especially in terms of Signal to Interference plus Noise Ratio (SINR)

Control and data channel resource allocation in OFDMA heterogeneous networks

This paper investigates the downlink resource allocation problem in Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) Heterogeneous Networks (HetNets) consisting of macro cells and small cells sharing the same frequency band. Dense deployment of small cells overlaid by a macro layer is considered to be one of the most promising solutions for providing hotspot coverage in future 5G networks. The focus is to devise an optimised policy for small cells’ access to the shared spectrum, in terms of their transmissions, in order to keep small cell served users sum data rate at high levels while ensuring that certain level of quality of service (QoS) for the macro cell users in the vicinity of small cells is provided. Both data and control channel constraints are considered, to ensure that not only the macro cell users’ data rate demands are met, but also a certain level of Bit Error Rate (BER) is ensured for the control channel information. Control channel reliability is especially important as it holds key information to successfully decode the data channel. The problem is addressed by our proposed linear binary integer programming heuristic algorithm which maximises the small cells utility while ensuring the macro users imposed constraints. To further reduce the computational complexity, we propose a progressive interference aware low complexity heuristic solution. Discussion is also presented for the implementation possibility of our proposed algorithms in a practical network. The performance of both the proposed algorithms is compared with the conventional Reuse-1 scheme under different fading conditions and small cell loads. Results show a negligible drop in small cell performance for our proposed schemes, as a trade-off for ensuring all macro users data rate demands, while Reuse-1 scheme can even lead up to 40 % outage when control region of the small cells in heavily loaded

Performance evaluation of self-configured two-tier heterogeneous cellular networks

[[abstract]]Two-tier macro/femto heterogeneous cellular networks (HCNs) have received considerable attention due to substantial improvements in high quality in-building coverage and system capacity. Distributed self-configured femtocells can be realized to mitigate inter-tier interference between macrocells and femtocells without heavy operating costs by incorporating broadcasting mechanism of macrocell. With the aid of the macrocell, who provides critical global information, femtocells can configure related parameters to achieve interference mitigation. A tractable stochastic geometry-based analytical model is proposed to evaluate of proposed self-configured scheme in terms of coverage probability. We also conduct simulation experiments according to data from OpenCellID to prove the effectiveness of the proposed self-configured scheme in the realistic two-tier HCNs.[[conferencetype]]國際[[conferencedate]]20131013~20131016[[booktype]]紙本[[iscallforpapers]]Y[[conferencelocation]]Manchester, Englan

Interference Aware Cognitive Femtocell Networks

Femtocells Access Points (FAP) are low power, plug and play home base stations which are designed to extend the cellular radio range in indoor environments where macrocell coverage is generally poor. They offer significant increases in data rates over a short range, enabling high speed wireless and mobile broadband services, with the femtocell network overlaid onto the macrocell in a dual-tier arrangement. In contrast to conventional cellular systems which are well planned, FAP are arbitrarily installed by the end users and this can create harmful interference to both collocated femtocell and macrocell users. The interference becomes particularly serious in high FAP density scenarios and compromises the ensuing data rate. Consequently, effective management of both cross and co-tier interference is a major design challenge in dual-tier networks. Since traditional radio resource management techniques and architectures for single-tier systems are either not applicable or operate inefficiently, innovative dual-tier approaches to intelligently manage interference are required. This thesis presents a number of original contributions to fulfill this objective including, a new hybrid cross-tier spectrum sharing model which builds upon an existing fractional frequency reuse technique to ensure minimal impact on the macro-tier resource allocation. A new flexible and adaptive virtual clustering framework is then formulated to alleviate co-tier interference in high FAP densities situations and finally, an intelligent coverage extension algorithm is developed to mitigate excessive femto-macrocell handovers, while upholding the required quality of service provision. This thesis contends that to exploit the undoubted potential of dual-tier, macro-femtocell architectures an interference awareness solution is necessary. Rigorous evidence confirms that noteworthy performance improvements can be achieved in the quality of the received signal and throughput by applying cognitive methods to manage interference

Models and optimisation methods for interference coordination in self-organising cellular networks

A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of PhilosophyWe are at that moment of network evolution when we have realised that our telecommunication systems should mimic features of human kind, e.g., the ability to understand the medium and take advantage of its changes. Looking towards the future, the mobile industry envisions the use of fully automatised cells able to self-organise all their parameters and procedures. A fully self-organised network is the one that is able to avoid human involvement and react to the fluctuations of network, traffic and channel through the automatic/autonomous nature of its functioning. Nowadays, the mobile community is far from this fully self-organised kind of network, but they are taken the first steps to achieve this target in the near future. This thesis hopes to contribute to the automatisation of cellular networks, providing models and tools to understand the behaviour of these networks, and algorithms and optimisation approaches to enhance their performance. This work focuses on the next generation of cellular networks, in more detail, in the DownLink (DL) of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) based networks. Within this type of cellular system, attention is paid to interference mitigation in self-organising macrocell scenarios and femtocell deployments. Moreover, this thesis investigates the interference issues that arise when these two cell types are jointly deployed, complementing each other in what is currently known as a two-tier network. This thesis also provides new practical approaches to the inter-cell interference problem in both macro cell and femtocell OFDMA systems as well as in two-tier networks by means of the design of a novel framework and the use of mathematical optimisation. Special attention is paid to the formulation of optimisation problems and the development of well-performing solving methods (accurate and fast)

Recent advances in radio resource management for heterogeneous LTE/LTE-A networks

As heterogeneous networks (HetNets) emerge as one of the most promising developments toward realizing the target specifications of Long Term Evolution (LTE) and LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) networks, radio resource management (RRM) research for such networks has, in recent times, been intensively pursued. Clearly, recent research mainly concentrates on the aspect of interference mitigation. Other RRM aspects, such as radio resource utilization, fairness, complexity, and QoS, have not been given much attention. In this paper, we aim to provide an overview of the key challenges arising from HetNets and highlight their importance. Subsequently, we present a comprehensive survey of the RRM schemes that have been studied in recent years for LTE/LTE-A HetNets, with a particular focus on those for femtocells and relay nodes. Furthermore, we classify these RRM schemes according to their underlying approaches. In addition, these RRM schemes are qualitatively analyzed and compared to each other. We also identify a number of potential research directions for future RRM development. Finally, we discuss the lack of current RRM research and the importance of multi-objective RRM studies