Cell Association and Interference Coordination in Heterogeneous LTE-A Cellular Networks

TLDR

Embedding pico/femto base‑stations and relays into macro‑cellular networks promises coverage and capacity gains by enabling cell splitting and higher spatial reuse, but their unplanned deployment, disparate transmit powers, and lack of traffic aggregation can cause significant interference variability. The paper proposes innovative cell‑association and inter‑cell interference‑coordination paradigms to unlock these gains in heterogeneous LTE‑A networks. It introduces lightweight, low‑overhead techniques such as cell splitting, range expansion, semi‑static resource negotiation on third‑party backhaul, and fast dynamic interference management via over‑the‑air signaling. Numerical results demonstrate that these methods deliver substantial performance improvements over existing cellular network approaches.

Abstract

Embedding pico/femto base-stations and relay nodes in a macro-cellular network is a promising method for achieving substantial gains in coverage and capacity compared to macro-only networks. These new types of base-stations can operate on the same wireless channel as the macro-cellular network, providing higher spatial reuse via cell splitting. However, these base-stations are deployed in an unplanned manner, can have very different transmit powers, and may not have traffic aggregation among many users. This could potentially result in much higher interference magnitude and variability. Hence, such deployments require the use of innovative cell association and inter-cell interference coordination techniques in order to realize the promised capacity and coverage gains. In this paper, we describe new paradigms for design and operation of such heterogeneous cellular networks. Specifically, we focus on cell splitting, range expansion, semi-static resource negotiation on third-party backhaul connections, and fast dynamic interference management for QoS via over-the-air signaling. Notably, our methodologies and algorithms are simple, lightweight, and incur extremely low overhead. Numerical studies show that they provide large gains over currently used methods for cellular networks.