Heterogeneous Cellular Networks

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Overview of Heterogeneous Networks

Geng Wu,1 Qian (Clara) Li,1 Rose Qingyang Hu,2 and Yi Qian3

1Intel Corporation, USA

2Utah State University, USA

3University of Nebraska – Lincoln, USA

We are living in a rapidly changing world. Every two days now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003 [1]. Users want to communicate with each other at any time, anywhere and through any media, including instant messages, email, voice and video. Users want to share their personal life experience, ideas and news with friends through social networking, and use their intelligent mobile devices to produce and to consume content generated by users or by commercial media. In the meantime, mobile internet is rapidly evolving towards embedded internet, expanding its reach from people to machines [2]. In fact, the wireless industry now expects 50 billion machine-type devices connected to the global network by 2020 [3], truly forming an internet of everything.

The advancement of a number of fundamental technologies powers the rapid market growth. Moore's Law continues to provide more transistors and power budget, enabling the semiconductor industry to deliver more powerful signal processing capabilities at lower power consumption and lower cost. Application developers continue to innovate and maximize the benefits of the signal processing technology, with user interface evolving from keypad to touch to gesture, and applications from voice to video to augmented ...