School of Electrical and Computer Engineering Georgia Institute of Technology

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Small Cells for Beyond 4G Cellular Systems

Overview

New technologies are considered to play a major role for wireless cellular systems beyond the existing 4G paradigm. The need for increased system capacity in the order of several orders of magnitude has led to the proliferation of smaller low-powered cellular layers underlaid on the existing macrocell layer. These low-powered small cells include picocells, femtocells, metrocells, etc. While picocells and metrocells are utilized for outdoor deployments, femtocells are proposed for deployment in indoor environments such as residential or enterprise buildings. Such a type of network that includes different cellular layers, each with their unique characteristics such as transmission power, backhaul technology is termed as a heterogeneous network (HetNet). The introduction of small cells into the HetNet paradigm leads to several challenges and calls for a profound rethinking of several existing approaches for interference management, mobility management, energy savings among other techniques.

The fundamental research objectives of this project are to rethink the design of several existing approaches including interference management, mobility management, green communications to seamless integrate small cells into the next generation cellular networks. The specific outcomes of the project are: i) to develop novel interference management approaches, ii) to design sophisticated cell association mechanisms, iii) to develop novel mobility management approaches, iv) to model energy consumption at the cell sites and propose energy saving approaches and v) to develop novel approaches to address the backhaul congestion problem common to small cells.