Heterogeneous Cellular Networks

2

Radio Resource and Interference Management for Heterogeneous Networks

Lingjia Liu,1 Ying Li,2 Boon Loong Ng,2 and Zhouyue Pi2

1University of Kansas, USA

2Samsung Telecommunications America, USA

2.1 Introduction

The demand of wireless data traffic is explosively increasing due to the increasing popularity, among consumers and businesses, of smartphones and other mobile data devices such as tablets, netbooks and eBook readers. It was predicted that mobile data traffic will grow 26 times between 2010 and 2015 [1]. In order to meet this spectacular growth in mobile data traffic, improvements in radio interface efficiency would be of paramount importance.

The current fourth generation (4G) cellular technologies [2] including LTE-Advanced and Advanced Mobile WiMAX (IEEE 802.16m) use advanced physical layer technologies such as orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), multiple input multiple output (MIMO), multi-user MIMO and adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) to achieve spectral efficiencies which are close to theoretical limits in terms of bps/Hz/cell. Continuous improvements in air-interface performance are being considered by introducing new techniques such as carrier aggregation, higher order MIMO configurations, coordinated multi-point (CoMP) transmission and relays. However, based on the current network infrastructure, any further improvements in spectral efficiency would be marginal even in the best case.

When spectral efficiency of a single cell in terms of bps/Hz/cell ...