We have seen a rapid increase in mobile data traffic in cellular networks, especially in densely populated areas called “hotspots.” In order to deal with this trend, heterogeneous networks (HetNet) are attracting much attention as a method of effectively accommodating such traffic increases using the Long Term Evolution (LTE)-Advanced system in the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). This paper first presents an overview of HetNet, where various wireless nodes can be deployed over the coverage area formed by macro base stations (BSs). Next, various evaluation results are provided for HetNet, where pico BSs (“Pico-BSs”) are deployed over the coverage area of macro BSs (“Macro-BSs”). Then, this paper presents a comprehensive analysis, not only of the effect of overlaying Pico-BSs but also a detailed analyses of the techniques called “cell range expansion (CRE)” and “enhanced inter-cell interference coordination (eICIC)” for facilitating the offloading of user terminals (UEs) from Macro-BSs to Pico-BSs and mitigating interference, respectively, for both downlink and uplink. Noteworthy outcomes found through the comprehensive study are that CRE provides throughput improvements for uplinks, especially for UE connected to Pico-BSs. In addition, this paper demonstrates that CRE contributes to improving downlink throughput especially for low traffic loads. The outcome regarding eICIC is that eICIC provides improvements in total throughput, in spite of the fact that eICIC causes unfairness between UE connected to the Pico-BSs and those with Macro-BSs.

In this letter, we propose a novel precoding scheme for base station (BS) cooperation in downlink cellular networks that allow overlapped clusters. The proposed precoding scheme is designed to mitigate the overlapping-BS interference by maximizing the so-called clustered virtual signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (CVSINR). Simulations show that with the proposed scheme, overlapped clustering provides substantial throughput gain over the traditional non-overlapped clustering methods, and user fairness is also improved.

The impact and benefits of infrastructure support are shown by introducing an achievable throughput scaling law of a ultra-wide band (UWB) ad hoc network in which m base stations (BSs) are regularly located. The existing multi-hop scheme consisting of two variants, with and without BS help, is utilized with a slight modification. Our result indicates that the derived throughput scaling depends on the path-loss exponent due to the power-limited characteristics for all operating regimes examined. Furthermore, it is shown that the total throughput scales linearly with parameter m as m is larger than a certain level. It thus turns out the use of infrastructure is also helpful in improving the throughput scaling of UWB networks in some conditions.

High frequency bands such as the 3-GHz band have received much attention as frequency resources for broadband mobile communication systems. Radio Frequency (RF) integrated antennas are considered to be useful as base station antennas in decreasing the feeding loss that is otherwise inevitable in high frequency bands and they ensure sufficient power for broadband transmission. One problem in actualizing RF integrated antennas is miniaturizing the duplexer, which is generally large, among the RF circuitry components. To downsize the duplexer, we consider separately locating the transmitter (Tx) and receiver (Rx) antennas. To suppress further the mutual coupling between the Tx and Rx antennas, we investigate a filter integrated antenna configuration. In this paper, we consider an aperture coupled patch antenna as the base antenna configuration and propose a new filter integrated antenna that comprises multiple rectangular elements installed between the coupling slot and radiation element of the Rx antenna. The simulation and measurement results confirm that the new antenna reduces the mutual coupling in the transmission frequency band up to 5.7 dB compared to the conventional slot coupled patch antenna configuration.

This paper proposes applying our inter-cell interference (ICI) cancellation method to fractional frequency reuse (FFR) and evaluates the resulting spectral efficiency improvement. With our ICI cancellation method based on base station cooperation, the control station generates ICI replica signals by simple linear processing. Moreover, FFR effectively utilizes frequency resources by both allowing users in the cell-center region to access all available sub-channels and increasing the transmission power to users in the cell-edge region. FFR provides the conditions under which the ICI cancellation method works effectively. Computer simulations show that the average spectral efficiency of the proposed method is comparable to that of cooperative MU-MIMO, which can completely remove ICI.

The energy consumption of the information and communication technology (ICT) industry, which has become a serious problem, is mostly due to the network infrastructure rather than the mobile terminals. In this paper, we focus on reducing the energy consumption of base stations (BSs) by adjusting their working modes (active or sleep). Specifically, the objective is to minimize the energy consumption while satisfying quality of service (QoS, e.g., blocking probability) requirement and, at the same time, avoiding frequent mode switching to reduce signaling and delay overhead. The problem is modeled as a dynamic programming (DP) problem, which is NP-hard in general. Based on cooperation among neighboring BSs, a low-complexity algorithm is proposed to reduce the size of state space as well as that of action space. Simulations demonstrate that, with the proposed algorithm, the active BS pattern well meets the time variation and the non-uniform spatial distribution of system traffic. Moreover, the tradeoff between the energy saving from BS sleeping and the cost of switching is well balanced by the proposed scheme.

This paper investigates a precoding method in downlink multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmission with multiple base station (BS) cooperation, where each user device basically feeds back the instantaneous channel state information (CSI) to only the nearest BS, but the users near the cell edge additionally feedback the instantaneous CSI to the second nearest BS among the cooperating BSs. Our precoding method is categorized as a form of multi-cell processing (MCP) [5], in which the transmission information to a user is shared by the cooperating BSs in order to utilize fully the degrees of freedom of the spatial channel, and is based on block diagonalization of the channel matrix. However, since some elements of the channel matrix are unknown, we allow partially non-orthogonal transmission. More specifically, we allow inter-user interference to users with limited instantaneous CSI feedback from the channel where the instantaneous CSIs of those users are not obtained at the BSs. The other sources of inter-user interference are set to zero based on the block diagonalization of the channel matrix. The proposed method more efficiently utilizes the degrees of freedom of the spatial channel compared to the case with full orthogonal transmission at the cost of increased inter-user interference. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed method compared to the conventional approaches, which can accommodate the partial CSI feedback scenario, from the viewpoints of the required transmission power and achievable throughput.

Traditional cellular networks suffer the so-called “cell-edge problem” in which the user throughput is deteriorated because of pathloss and inter-cell (co-channel) interference. Recently, Base Station Cooperation (BSC) was proposed as a solution to the cell-edge problem by alleviating the interference and improving diversity and multiplexing gains at the cell-edge. However, it has minimal impact on cell-inner users and increases the complexity of the network. Moreover, static clustering, which fixes the cooperating cells, suffers from inter-cluster interference at the cluster-edge. In this paper, dynamic fractional cooperation is proposed to realize dynamic clustering in a shared RRU network. In the proposed algorithm, base station cooperation is performed dynamically at cell edges for throughput improvement of users located in these areas. To realize such base station cooperation in large scale cellular networks, coordinated scheduling and distributed dynamic cooperation are introduced. The introduction of coordinated scheduling in BSC multi-user MIMO not only maximizes the performance of BSC for cell-edge users but also reduces computational complexity by performing simple single-cell MIMO for cell-inner users. Furthermore, the proposed dynamic clustering employing shared RRU network realizes efficient transmission at all cell edges by forming cooperative cells dynamically with minimal network complexity. Owing to the combinations of the proposed algorithms, dynamic fractional cooperation achieves high network performance at all areas in the cellular network. Simulation results show that the cell-average and the 5% cell-edge user throughput can be significantly increased in practical cellular network scenarios.

This paper proposes a resource allocation method based on TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) throughput for base station diversity systems. A goal of this study is to achieve high throughput wireless Internet access by utilizing multiple wireless links effectively. The conventional work showed that base station diversity techniques can improve TCP performance. However, the improvement depends on the wireless environment of the wireless terminal. The proposed resource allocation method allocates wireless links to a wireless terminal based on its estimated TCP throughput and current traffic of each base station. Our method can take account of some network protocols such as TCP and UDP (User Datagram Protocol) by measuring the current traffic of each base station. In addition, wireless links are preferentially assigned to the wireless terminal that has the largest performance improvement per wireless link. Therefore, the proposal provides better overall system performance than the previous technique.

This paper proposes a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) precoding scheme for the down link of single user (SU) cooperative base station (BS) systems. The proposed precoding scheme mitigates the performance degradation caused by large inter-BS path-loss imbalance and large intra-BS antenna correlation by controlling two parameters. The proposed precoding scheme multiplexes the multiple layers by adjusting the amplitude of each layer, and then decreases the occurrence probability of the small absolute value of the log likelihood ratio (LLR), and so reduces the bit error rate (BER). Link level simulation results show that the proposed precoding scheme decreases the required signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of BER = 0.001 by 5.5 dB, 2.2 dB, and 0.7 dB in the case of QPSK and coding rate 1/1, 3/4, and 1/2 respectively. The proposed precoding scheme is also evaluated in terms of spectrum efficiency using rank adaptation and adaptive modulation, showing that it improves the spectrum efficiency when the SNR per a receiver antenna is higher than 4 dB.

Base station (BS) cooperation is a promising technique to suppress co-channel interference for cellular networks. However, practical limitations constrain the scale of cooperation, thus the network is divided into small disjoint BS cooperation groups, namely clusters. A decentralized scheme for BS cluster formation is proposed based on efficient BS negotiations, of which the feedback overhead per user is nearly irrelevant to the network size, and the number of iteration rounds scales very slowly with the network size. Simulations show that our decentralized scheme provides significant sum-rate gain over static clustering and performs almost the same as the existing centralized approach. The proposed scheme is well suited for large-scale cellular networks due to its low overhead and complexity.

Base Station (BS) cooperation has been considered as a promising technology to mitigate co-channel interference (CCI), yielding great capacity improvement in cellular systems. In this paper, by combining frequency domain cooperation and space domain cooperation together, we design a new CCI mitigation scheme to maximize the total utility for a multi-cell OFDMA network. The scheme formulates the CCI mitigation problem as a mixture integer programming problem, which involves a joint user-set-oriented subcarrier assignment and power allocation. A computationally feasible algorithm based on Lagrange dual decomposition is derived to evaluate the optimal value of the problem. Moreover, a low-complexity suboptimal algorithm is also presented. Simulation results show that our scheme outperforms the counterparts incorporating BS cooperation in a single domain considerably, and the proposed low-complexity algorithm achieves near optimal performance.

Base station coordination is considered as a promising technique to mitigate inter-cell interference and improve the cell-edge performance in cellular orthogonal frequency division multiple-access (OFDMA) networks. The problem to design an efficient radio resource allocation scheme for coordinated cellular OFDMA networks incorporating base station coordination has been only partially investigated. In this contribution, a novel radio resource allocation algorithm with universal frequency reuse is proposed to support base station coordinated transmission. Firstly, with the assumption of global coordination between all base station sectors in the network, a coordinated subchannel assignment algorithm is proposed. Then, by dividing the entire network into a number of disjoint coordinated clusters of base station sectors, a reduced-feedback algorithm for subchannel assignment is proposed for practical use. The utility function based on the user average throughput is used to balance the efficiency and fairness of wireless resource allocation. System level simulation results demonstrate that the reduced-feedback subchannel assignment algorithm significantly improves the cell-edge average throughput and the fairness index of users in the network, with acceptable degradation of cell-average performance.

This paper presents a newly developed small-sized shaped beam base station antenna in order to reduce inter-sector interference for next generation high speed wireless data communication systems. The developed antenna realizes polarization diversity as a single small-sized antenna without decreasing the 3 dB main beamwidth compared with the conventional antenna by applying a newly designed beam shaping method. Furthermore, side sub-reflectors are newly installed in the radome to reduce the antenna beam gain in the direction toward the edge region neighboring the other sectors of the horizontal antenna pattern. By adopting this type of reflector, the diameter of the radome can be minimized at 0.65 λ, which is slightly longer than that of the conventional antenna. Both a computer simulation and a field measurement test based on an actual cellular network were conducted for the purpose of clarifying the validity of the shaped beam antenna. In the results, the CINR at the service area by the shaped beam antenna was 1 dB and 3.5 dB better than that of the conventional antenna at the median and 10% of CDF, respectively. The developed antenna will be expected to contribute to the enhancement of the quality of cellular radio systems in the future.

In this paper, we study the performance of base station (BS) cooperation for downlink transmission. Based on a modified Wyner multicell model, an opportunistic intra cell scheduling scheme is proposed. Then, we derive a closed-form expression for the sum-rate capacity of the proposed scheme in the Rayleigh flat-fading channel. Also, we prove that the opportunistic scheme can be regarded as providing a downlink beam-forming scheme to achieve a tighter lower bound for the downlink sum rate capacity. Numerical results confirm our theoretical analysis.

Correction factors are presented for estimating the RF electromagnetic field strength in the compliance assessment of human exposure from an indoor RF radio source in the frequency range from 800 MHz to 3.5 GHz. The correction factors are derived from the increase in the spatial average electric field strength distribution, which is dependent on the building materials. The spatial average electric field strength is calculated using relative complex dielectric constants of building materials. The relative complex dielectric constant is obtained through measurement of the transmission and reflection losses for eleven kinds of building materials used in business office buildings and single family dwellings.

The present paper focuses on the application of the base station cooperation (BSC) technique in fractional frequency reuse (FFR) networks. Fractional frequency reuse is considered to be a promising scheme for avoiding the inter-cell interference problem in OFDMA cellular systems, such as WiMAX, in which the edge mobile stations (MSs) of adjacent cells use different subchannels for separate transmission. However, the problem of FFR is that the cell edge spectral efficiency (SE) is much lower than that of the cell center. The BSC technique, in which adjacent BSs perform cooperative transmission for one cell edge MS with the same channel, may improve the cell edge SE. However, since more BSs transmit signals for one cell edge MS, the use of BSC can also increase the inter-cell interference, which might degrade the network performance. In this paper, with a focus on this tradeoff, we propose an adaptive BSC scheme in which BSC is only performed for the cell edge MSs that can achieve a significant capacity increase with only a slight increase in inter-cell interference. Moreover, a channel reallocation scheme is proposed in order to further improve the performance of the adaptive BSC scheme. The simulation results reveal that, compared to the conventional FFR scheme, the proposed schemes are effective for improving the performance of FFR networks.

This paper proposes a multicast delivery system using base station diversity for cellular systems. Conventional works utilize single wireless link communication to achieve reliable multicast. In cellular systems, received signal intensity declines in cell edge areas. Therefore, wireless terminals in cell edge areas suffer from many transmission errors due to low received signal intensity. Additionally, multi-path fading also causes dynamic fluctuation of received signal intensity. Wireless terminals also suffer from transmission errors due to the multi-path fading. The proposed system utilizes multiple wireless link communication to improve transmission performance. Each wireless terminal communicates with some neighbor base stations, and combines frame information which arrives from different base stations. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed system can achieve multicast data delivery with a short transmission period and can reduce consumed wireless resource due to retransmission.

A filter integrated antenna configuration that suppresses the coupling signal from the transmitter (Tx) to receiver (Rx) base station antenna is investigated. We propose an aperture coupled patch antenna with multiple trapezoidal elements installed on the substrate of the Rx antenna between the radiation and feed layers in order to increase the bandwidth in the Rx band while maintaining low mutual coupling in the Tx band. The mutual coupling characteristics and the fractional bandwidth of the Rx antenna are presented as functions of the shape and width of the trapezoidal elements.

A QoS support technique for easily minimizing delay in multihop wireless networks is proposed. Using a priority queue operation that reduces delays overall, the proposed technique, Reduced Congestion Queuing (RCQ), solves problems peculiar to multihops. By adding RCQ to a multihop system, base station or access point density and cost can be more effectively curtailed than by simply applying multihops to a cellular network or wireless LAN because RCQ expands the multihop service area. Due to its simplicity, the proposed technique can be used in a wide range of applications, including VoIP.