Chapter 11
Future Directions
It has been forecast that the increase in users' demand for mobile Internet data applications will overload Third Generation (3G) networks capacity in the coming years and will force International Mobile Telecommunications Advanced (IMT-Advanced) deployment to be optimized. In addition to the overall increase in throughput demand, there is a need for improving the ubiquity of the Quality of Service (QoS) indicators – allowing the mobile users to experience high QoS values in any geographical position, while minimizing consumption of radio resources and energy. Future developments of IMT-Advanced systems include more efficient physical mechanism to deal with the instable radio propagation and crowded radio frequency spectrum. Nevertheless, while physical layer improvements are already close to their physical limits and only the higher order Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) mechanism seems to be able to improve system performance in terms of spectral efficiency, there is still huge potential to maximize efficiency at the radio resource and optimize interference management. There have been further developments in mobile communication systems to manage multicell and multiuser MIMO, together with new paradigms of network deployment including advanced relaying and Heterogeneous Networks (HetNets). In HetNets, cooperative Radio Resource Management (RRM) will consist first of coordinated scheduling/beamforming ...