Author index to volume 8

Abstract

Existing cellular wireless networks are facing fundamental challenges due to the exponential demand of mobile data traffic, the need of higher data rates, user coverage, lowering latency, and minimizing signaling overhead. In order to address these challenges, future cellular networks will require adopting a multi-cell multi-tier cooperative architecture. However, in multi-cell cooperation, the user equipment (UE) needs to estimate the channel state information (CSI) and feed it back to the base station (BS) scheduler for adaptive resource management. This results in a significant increase of signaling overhead and feedback latency into the cooperative networks. These overhead and latency are the two key challenges to achieve gains in coordinated multi-point (CoMP) operation. In this research, we study the control plane protocols for cooperative communications and propose a novel coordination architecture to improve the performance of multi-cell cooperative cellular networks. We examine the performance of the proposed CoMP coordination architecture by performing simulation on different homogeneous and heterogeneous scenarios. Simulations outcome of the multicell cooperative cellular networks show that the proposed coordination architecture has the potential to reduce the signaling overhead and feedback latency compared to conventional methods that eventually will improve the performance of cooperative cellular networks.