Heterogeneous Cellular Networks

Preface

Wireless data traffic has been increasing exponentially in recent years. Driven by a new generation of devices (smart phone, netbooks, etc.) and highly bandwidth-demanding applications such as video, capacity demand increases much faster than spectral efficiency improvement, in particular at hot spots/area. Also as service migrates from voice centric to data centric, more users operate from indoor, which requires increased link budget and coverage extension to provide uniform user experience. Traditional networks optimized for homogeneous traffic face unprecedented challenges to meet the demand cost-effectively. More recently, 3GPP LTE-advanced has started a new study item to investigate heterogeneous cellular network deployments as an efficient way to improve system capacity as well as effectively enhance network coverage. Unlike the traditional heterogeneous networks that deal with the interworking of wireless local area networks and cellular networks, in which the research community has already been studied for more than a decade, in this new paradigm in cellular network domain, a heterogeneous network is a network containing network nodes with different characteristics such as transmission power and RF coverage area. The low power micro nodes and high power macro nodes can be maintained under the management of the same operator. They can share the same frequency carrier that the operator provides. In this case, joint radio resource/interference management needs to ...