Showing papers on "Cellular network published in 2011"

A survey on 3GPP heterogeneous networks

Abstract: As the spectral efficiency of a point-to-point link in cellular networks approaches its theoretical limits, with the forecasted explosion of data traffic, there is a need for an increase in the node density to further improve network capacity. However, in already dense deployments in today's networks, cell splitting gains can be severely limited by high inter-cell interference. Moreover, high capital expenditure cost associated with high power macro nodes further limits viability of such an approach. This article discusses the need for an alternative strategy, where low power nodes are overlaid within a macro network, creating what is referred to as a heterogeneous network. We survey current state of the art in heterogeneous deployments and focus on 3GPP LTE air interface to describe future trends. A high-level overview of the 3GPP LTE air interface, network nodes, and spectrum allocation options is provided, along with the enabling mechanisms for heterogeneous deployments. Interference management techniques that are critical for LTE heterogeneous deployments are discussed in greater detail. Cell range expansion, enabled through cell biasing and adaptive resource partitioning, is seen as an effective method to balance the load among the nodes in the network and improve overall trunking efficiency. An interference cancellation receiver plays a crucial role in ensuring acquisition of weak cells and reliability of control and data reception in the presence of legacy signals.

How much energy is needed to run a wireless network

Abstract: In order to quantify the energy efficiency of a wireless network, the power consumption of the entire system needs to be captured. In this article, the necessary extensions with respect to existing performance evaluation frameworks are discussed. The most important addenda of the proposed energy efficiency evaluation framework (E3F) are a sophisticated power model for various base station types, as well as large-scale long-term traffic models. The BS power model maps the RF output power radiated at the antenna elements to the total supply power of a BS site. The proposed traffic model emulates the spatial distribution of the traffic demands over large geographical regions, including urban and rural areas, as well as temporal variations between peak and off-peak hours. Finally, the E3F is applied to quantify the energy efficiency of the downlink of a 3GPP LTE radio access network.

Green Cellular Networks: A Survey, Some Research Issues and Challenges

Abstract: Energy efficiency in cellular networks is a growing concern for cellular operators to not only maintain profitability, but also to reduce the overall environment effects. This emerging trend of achieving energy efficiency in cellular networks is motivating the standardization authorities and network operators to continuously explore future technologies in order to bring improvements in the entire network infrastructure. In this article, we present a brief survey of methods to improve the power efficiency of cellular networks, explore some research issues and challenges and suggest some techniques to enable an energy efficient or "green" cellular network. Since base stations consume a maximum portion of the total energy used in a cellular system, we will first provide a comprehensive survey on techniques to obtain energy savings in base stations. Next, we discuss how heterogenous network deployment based on micro, pico and femtocells can be used to achieve this goal. Since cognitive radio and cooperative relaying are undisputed future technologies in this regard, we propose a research vision to make these technologies more energy efficient. Lastly, we explore some broader perspectives in realizing a "green" cellular network technology.

Resource Sharing Optimization for Device-to-Device Communication Underlaying Cellular Networks

Abstract: We consider Device-to-Device (D2D) communication underlaying cellular networks to improve local services. The system aims to optimize the throughput over the shared resources while fulfilling prioritized cellular service constraints. Optimum resource allocation and power control between the cellular and D2D connections that share the same resources are analyzed for different resource sharing modes. Optimality is discussed under practical constraints such as minimum and maximum spectral efficiency restrictions, and maximum transmit power or energy limitation. It is found that in most of the considered cases, optimum power control and resource allocation for the considered resource sharing modes can either be solved in closed form or searched from a finite set. The performance of the D2D underlay system is evaluated in both a single-cell scenario, and a Manhattan grid environment with multiple WINNER II A1 office buildings. The results show that by proper resource management, D2D communication can effectively improve the total throughput without generating harmful interference to cellular networks.

Enhanced intercell interference coordination challenges in heterogeneous networks

Abstract: 3GPP LTE-Advanced has recently been investigating heterogeneous network (HetNet) deployments as a cost effective way to deal with the unrelenting traffic demand. HetNets consist of a mix of macrocells, remote radio heads, and low-power nodes such as picocells, femtocells, and relays. Leveraging network topology, increasing the proximity between the access network and the end users, has the potential to provide the next significant performance leap in wireless networks, improving spatial spectrum reuse and enhancing indoor coverage. Nevertheless, deployment of a large number of small cells overlaying the macrocells is not without new technical challenges. In this article, we present the concept of heterogeneous networks and also describe the major technical challenges associated with such network architecture. We focus in particular on the standardization activities within the 3GPP related to enhanced intercell interference coordination.

Toward dynamic energy-efficient operation of cellular network infrastructure

Abstract: The operation of cellular network infrastructure incurs significant electrical energy consumption. From the perspective of cellular network operators, reducing this consumption is not only a matter of showing environmental responsibility, but also of substantially reducing their operational expenditure. We discuss how dynamic operation of cellular base stations, in which redundant base stations are switched off during periods of low traffic such as at night, can provide significant energy savings. We quantitatively estimate these potential savings through a first-order analysis based on real cellular traffic traces and information regarding base station locations in a part of Manchester, United Kingdom. We also discuss a number of open issues pertinent to implementing such energy-efficient dynamic base station operation schemes, such as various approaches to ensure coverage, and interoperator coordination.

Capacity Enhancement Using an Interference Limited Area for Device-to-Device Uplink Underlaying Cellular Networks

Abstract: A new interference management strategy is proposed to enhance the overall capacity of cellular networks (CNs) and device-to-device (D2D) systems. We consider M out of K cellular user equipments (CUEs) and one D2D pair exploiting the same resources in the uplink (UL) period under the assumption of M multiple antennas at the base station (BS). First, we use the conventional mechanism which limits the maximum transmit power of the D2D transmitter so as not to generate harmful interference from D2D systems to CNs. Second, we propose a δD-interference limited area (ILA) control scheme to manage interference from CNs to D2D systems. The method does not allow the coexistence (i.e., use of the same resources) of CUEs and a D2D pair if the CUEs are located in the δD-ILA defined as the area in which the interference to signal ratio (ISR) at the D2D receiver is greater than the predetermined threshold, δD. Next, we analyze the coverage of the δD-ILA and derive the lower bound of the ergodic capacity as a closed form. Numerical results show that the δD-ILA based D2D gain is much greater than the conventional D2D gain, whereas the capacity loss to the CNs caused by using the δD-ILA is negligibly small.

System and method for adverse mobile application identification

Abstract: A system and method identifies mobile applications that can have an adverse effect on a mobile device or mobile network. In an implementation, a server monitors behavioral data relating to a mobile application and applies a model to determine if the application has an adverse effect or has the potential to cause an adverse effect on a mobile device or a network the mobile device may connect to. A mobile device may monitor behavioral data, apply a model to the data, and transmit a disposition to the server. The server may aggregate behavioral data or disposition information from multiple devices. The server may transmit or make available the disposition information to a subscriber through a web interface, API, email, or other mechanism. After identifying that an application may have an adverse effect, the server may enact corrective actions, such as generating device or network configuration data.

Base Station Operation and User Association Mechanisms for Energy-Delay Tradeoffs in Green Cellular Networks

Abstract: Energy-efficiency, one of the major design goals in wireless cellular networks, has received much attention lately, due to increased awareness of environmental and economic issues for network operators. In this paper, we develop a theoretical framework for BS energy saving that encompasses dynamic BS operation and the related problem of user association together. Specifically, we formulate a total cost minimization that allows for a flexible tradeoff between flow-level performance and energy consumption. For the user association problem, we propose an optimal energy-efficient user association policy and further present a distributed implementation with provable convergence. For the BS operation problem (i.e., BS switching on/off), which is a challenging combinatorial problem, we propose simple greedy-on and greedy-off algorithms that are inspired by the mathematical background of submodularity maximization problem. Moreover, we propose other heuristic algorithms based on the distances between BSs or the utilizations of BSs that do not impose any additional signaling overhead and thus are easy to implement in practice. Extensive simulations under various practical configurations demonstrate that the proposed user association and BS operation algorithms can significantly reduce energy consumption.

Understanding traffic dynamics in cellular data networks

Abstract: We conduct the first detailed measurement analysis of network resource usage and subscriber behavior using a large-scale data set collected inside a nationwide 3G cellular data network. The data set tracks close to a million subscribers over thousands of base stations. We analyze individual subscriber behaviors and observe a significant variation in network usage among subscribers. We characterize subscriber mobility and temporal activity patterns and identify their relation to traffic volume. We then investigate how efficiently radio resources are used by different subscribers as well as by different applications. We also analyze the network traffic from the point of view of the base stations and find significant temporal and spatial variations in different parts of the network, while the aggregated behavior appears predictable. Broadly, our observations deliver important insights into network-wide resource usage. We describe implications in pricing, protocol design and resource and spectrum management.

Analytical Evaluation of Fractional Frequency Reuse for OFDMA Cellular Networks

Abstract: Fractional frequency reuse (FFR) is an interference management technique well-suited to OFDMA-based cellular networks wherein the bandwidth of the cells is partitioned into regions with different frequency reuse factors. To date, FFR techniques have been typically been evaluated through system-level simulations using a hexagonal grid for the base station locations. This paper instead focuses on analytically evaluating the two main types of FFR deployments - Strict FFR and Soft Frequency Reuse (SFR) - using a Poisson point process to model the base station locations. The results are compared with the standard grid model and an actual urban deployment. Under reasonable special cases for modern cellular networks, our results reduce to simple closed-form expressions, which provide insight into system design guidelines and the relative merits of Strict FFR, SFR, universal reuse, and fixed frequency reuse. Finally, a SINR-proportional resource allocation strategy is proposed based on the analytical expressions and we observe that FFR provides an increase in the sum-rate as well as the well-known benefit of improved coverage for cell-edge users.

SLEEP mode techniques for small cell deployments

Abstract: Big things come in small packages; a particularly apt description of small cell deployment in cellular networks. Small cells have a big role to play in orchestrating a cellular network that can overcome the explosive mobile traffic upsurge at little cost to the network operator. However, if left unchecked, a large-scale small cell deployment can substantially increase the network energy consumption with strong ecological and economic implications. In this article, we introduce energy-efficient SLEEP mode algorithms for small cell base stations in a bid to reduce cellular networks' power consumption. The designed algorithms allow the hardware components in the BS to be astutely switched off in idle conditions, such that the energy consumption is modulated over the variations in traffic load. Three different strategies for algorithm control are discussed, relying on small cell driven, core network driven, and user equipment driven approaches. Based on a mixed voice and data traffic model, the algorithms present energy saving opportunities of approximately 10-60 percent in the network with respect to no SLEEP mode activation in small cells, coupled with additional capacity incentives.

Downlink Interference Alignment

Abstract: We develop an interference alignment (IA) technique for a downlink cellular system. In the uplink, IA schemes need channel-state-information exchange across base-stations of different cells, but our downlink IA technique requires feedback only within a cell. As a result, the proposed scheme can be implemented with a few changes to an existing cellular system where the feedback mechanism (within a cell) is already being considered for supporting multi-user MIMO. Not only is our proposed scheme implementable with little effort, it can in fact provide substantial gain especially when interference from a dominant interferer is significantly stronger than the remaining interference: it is shown that in the two-isolated cell layout, our scheme provides four-fold gain in throughput performance over a standard multi-user MIMO technique. We also show through simulations that our technique provides respectable gain under a more realistic scenario: it gives approximately 28% gain for a 19 hexagonal wrap-around-cell layout. Furthermore, we show that our scheme has the potential to provide substantial gain for macro-pico cellular networks where pico-users can be significantly interfered with by the nearby macro-BS.

Reliability Improvement Using Receive Mode Selection in the Device-to-Device Uplink Period Underlaying Cellular Networks

Abstract: A new interference management scheme is proposed to improve the reliability of a device-to-device (D2D) communication in the uplink (UL) period without reducing the power of cellular user equipment (UE). To improve the reliability of the D2D receiver, two conventional receive techniques and one proposed method are introduced. One of the conventional methods is demodulating the desired signal first (MODE1), while the other is demodulating an interference first (MODE2), and the proposed method is exploiting a retransmission of the interference from the base station (BS) (MODE3). We derive their outage probabilities in closed forms and explain the mechanism of receive mode selection which selects the mode guaranteeing the minimum outage probability among three modes. Numerical results show that by applying the receive mode selection, the D2D receiver achieves a remarkable enhancement of outage probability in the middle interference regime from the usage of MODE3 compared to the conventional ways of using only MODE1 or MODE2.

Cellular Traffic Offloading through WiFi Networks

Abstract: Cellular networks are currently facing the challenges of mobile data explosion. High-end mobile phones and laptops double their mobile data traffic every year and this trend is expected to continue given the rapid development of mobile social applications. It is imperative that novel architectures be developed to handle such voluminous mobile data. In this paper, we propose and evaluate an integrated architecture exploiting the opportunistic networking paradigm to migrate data traffic from cellular networks to metropolitan WiFi access points (APs). To quantify the benefits of deploying such an architecture, we consider the case of bulk file transfer and video streaming over 3G networks and simulate data delivery using real mobility data set of 500 taxis in an urban area. We are the first to quantitatively evaluate the gains of citywide WiFi offloading using large scale real traces. Our results give the numbers of APs needed for different requirements of quality of service for data delivery in large metropolitan area. We show that even with a sparse WiFi network the delivery performance can be significantly improved. This effort serves as an important feasibility study and provides guidelines for operators to evaluate the possibility and cost of this solution. Keywords-Cellular traffic offloading, delay tolerant, WiFi access points, trace-driven simulation.

Distributed Interference-Aware Energy-Efficient Power Optimization

Abstract: Power optimization techniques are becoming increasingly important in wireless system design since battery technology has not kept up with the demand of mobile devices. They are also critical to interference management in wireless systems because interference usually results from both aggressive spectral reuse and high power transmission and severely limits system performance. In this paper, we develop an energy-efficient power optimization scheme for interference-limited wireless communications. We consider both circuit and transmission powers and focus on energy efficiency over throughput. We first investigate a non-cooperative game for energy-efficient power optimization in frequency-selective channels and reveal the conditions of the existence and uniqueness of the equilibrium for this game. Most importantly, we discover a sufficient condition for generic multi-channel power control to have a unique equilibrium in frequency-selective channels. Then we study the tradeoff between energy efficiency and spectral efficiency and show by simulation results that the proposed scheme improves both energy efficiency and spectral efficiency in an interference-limited multi-cell cellular network.

A Tale of One City: Using Cellular Network Data for Urban Planning

Abstract: Cellular data from call detail records can help urban planners better understand city dynamics. The authors use CDR data to analyze people flow in and out of a suburban city near New York City.

Two-Level Downlink Scheduling for Real-Time Multimedia Services in LTE Networks

Abstract: Long-term evolution represents an emerging technology that promises a broadband and ubiquitous Internet access. But several aspects have to be considered for providing effective multimedia services to mobile users. In particular, in this work, we consider the design of a quality-of-service (QoS) aware packet scheduler for real-time downlink communications. To this aim, a novel two-level scheduling algorithm is conceived. The upper level exploits an innovative approach based on discrete-time linear control theory. Instead, at the lower level, a proportional fair scheduler has been properly tailored to our purposes. The performance and the complexity of the proposed scheme have been evaluated both theoretically and by using simulations. A comparison with recently proposed scheduling strategies has been also presented, considering several network conditions and real-time multimedia flows. Particular attention has been devoted to the evaluation of the quality-of-experience (QoE) provided to end users. Results have clearly shown that the proposed approach is able to greatly outperform the existing ones especially in the presence of real-time video flows.

Network energy saving technologies for green wireless access networks

Abstract: The energy consumption problem in the mobile industry has become crucial. For the sustainable growth of the mobile industry, energy efficiency (EE) of wireless systems has to be significantly improved. Plenty of efforts have been invested in achieving green wireless communications. This article provides an overview of network energy saving studies currently conducted in the 3GPP LTE standard body. The aim is to gain a better understanding of energy consumption and identify key EE research problems in wireless access networks. Classifying network energy saving technologies into the time, frequency, and spatial domains, the main solutions in each domain are described briefly. As presently the attention is mainly focused on solutions involving a single radio base station, we believe network solutions involving multiple networks/systems will be the most promising technologies toward green wireless access networks.

Multiuser MIMO in Distributed Antenna Systems With Out-of-Cell Interference

Abstract: Distributed antenna systems (DAS) augment the base station's transmit capability by adding multiple remote radio units, connected to the base station via a high bandwidth and low latency link. With DAS, the base station operates as if it had multiple antennas, but the antennas happen to be in different geographic locations. DAS have been shown to enhance coverage and capacity in cellular systems, in a variety of different configurations. This paper proposes, analyzes, and compares several downlink multiuser multiple input multiple output (MIMO) DAS strategies in terms of per-user throughput and area spectral efficiency. Zero-forcing transmit beamforming is used for transmission, the remote radio units may have one or more antennas, and the subscriber has a single receive antenna. Techniques considered include beamforming across all remote radio units (full transmission), using the same beamforming vector for each remote radio unit (simplified transmission), and selecting a subset of remote radio units. To facilitate rapid simulation and design space exploration, approximations of the ergodic rate are proposed for each technique assuming path-loss, small-scale Rayleigh fading, and out-of-cell interference. Simulations accounting for multiple interfering cells are used to compare the different transmission techniques. Full transmission is found to have the best performance even accounting for out-of-cell interference, though gains diminish for higher numbers of active users. Simplified transmission improves over no DAS but performance degrades with more active remote radio units.

Adaptive algorithms for detecting community structure in dynamic social networks

Abstract: Social networks exhibit a very special property: community structure. Understanding the network community structure is of great advantages. It not only provides helpful information in developing more social-aware strategies for social network problems but also promises a wide range of applications enabled by mobile networking, such as routings in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) and worm containments in cellular networks. Unfortunately, understanding this structure is very challenging, especially in dynamic social networks where social activities and interactions are evolving rapidly. Can we quickly and efficiently identify the network community structure? Can we adaptively update the network structure based on previously known information instead of recomputing from scratch? In this paper, we present Quick Community Adaptation (QCA), an adaptive modularity-based method for identifying and tracing community structure of dynamic online social networks. Our approach has not only the power of quickly and efficiently updating network communities, through a series of changes, by only using the structures identified from previous network snapshots, but also the ability of tracing the evolution of community structure over time. To illustrate the effectiveness of our algorithm, we extensively test QCA on real-world dynamic social networks including ENRON email network, arXiv e-print citation network and Facebook network. Finally, we demonstrate the bright applicability of our algorithm via a realistic application on routing strategies in MANETs. The comparative results reveal that social-aware routing strategies employing QCA as a community detection core outperform current available methods.

An untold story of middleboxes in cellular networks

Abstract: The use of cellular data networks is increasingly popular as network coverage becomes more ubiquitous and many diverse user-contributed mobile applications become available. The growing cellular traffic demand means that cellular network carriers are facing greater challenges to provide users with good network performance and energy efficiency, while protecting networks from potential attacks. To better utilize their limited network resources while securing the network and protecting client devices the carriers have already deployed various network policies that influence traffic behavior. Today, these policies are mostly opaque, though they directly impact application designs and may even introduce network vulnerabilities.We present NetPiculet, the first tool that unveils carriers' NAT and firewall policies by conducting intelligent measurement. By running NetPiculet on the major U.S. cellular providers as well as deploying it as a smartphone application in the wild covering more than 100 cellular ISPs, we identified the key NAT and firewall policies which have direct implications on performance, energy, and security. For example, NAT boxes and firewalls set timeouts for idle TCP connections, which sometimes cause significant energy waste on mobile devices. Although most carriers today deploy sophisticated firewalls, they are still vulnerable to various attacks such as battery draining and denial of service. These findings can inform developers in optimizing the interaction between mobile applications and cellular networks and also guide carriers in improving their network configurations.

Method of multi-radio interworking in heterogeneous wireless communication networks

Abstract: A method of multi-radio interworking to provide integrated cellular and WLAN access for a multi-radio device is provided. A serving base station in a cellular network first obtains wireless local area network (WLAN) information and then forward the WLAN information to a serving device such that the serving device is capable to connect with both the cellular network and a WLAN. The WLAN information may comprise scanning information, WLAN QoS information, WLAN layer-3 information, or additional WLAN access point information. The WLAN information is forwarded based on triggering events associated with the serving base station information, WLAN coverage information, or the serving device information. Based on the received WLAN information, when entering WLAN coverage, the serving device activates its WLAN access to forward traffic from the cellular access network to the WLAN access network. When leaving WLAN coverage, the serving device deactivates its WLAN access to save power consumption.

Overlapping communities in dynamic networks: their detection and mobile applications

Abstract: Many practical problems on Mobile networking, such as routing strategies in MANETs, sensor reprogramming in WSNs and worm containment in online social networks (OSNs) share an ubiquitous, yet interesting feature in their organizations: community structure. Knowledge of this structure provides us not only crucial information about the network principles, but also key insights into designing more effective algorithms for practical problems enabled by Mobile networking. However, understanding this interesting feature is extremely challenging on dynamic networks where changes to their topologies are frequently introduced, and especially when network communities in reality usually overlap with each other. We focus on the following questions (1) Can we effectively detect the overlapping community structure in a dynamic network? (2) Can we quickly and adaptively update the network structure only based on its history without recomputing from scratch? (3) How does the detection of network communities help mobile applications? We propose AFOCS, a two-phase framework for not only detecting quickly but also tracing effectively the evolution of overlapped network communities in dynamic mobile networks. With the great advantages of the overlapping community structure, AFOCS significantly helps in reducing up to 7 times the infection rates in worm containment on OSNs, and up to 11 times overhead while maintaining good delivery time and ratio in forwarding strategies in MANETs.

Characterizing and modeling internet traffic dynamics of cellular devices

Abstract: Understanding Internet traffic dynamics in large cellular networks is important for network design, troubleshooting, performance evaluation, and optimization In this paper, we present the results from our study, which is based upon a week-long aggregated flow level mobile device traffic data collected from a major cellular operator's core network In this study, we measure and characterize the spatial and temporal dynamics of mobile Internet traffic We distinguish our study from other related work by conducting the measurement at a larger scale and exploring mobile data traffic patterns along two new dimensions -- device types and applications that generate such traffic patterns Based on the findings of our measurement analysis, we propose a Zipf-like model to capture the volume distribution of application traffic and a Markov model to capture the volume dynamics of aggregate Internet traffic We further customize our models for different device types using an unsupervised clustering algorithm to improve prediction accuracy

TANGO: traffic-aware network planning and green operation

Abstract: This article addresses the potential paradigm shift of the next-generation cellular networks from the viewpoint of energy efficiency. In particular, it reveals that networks planning and operation should be more energy efficiency oriented; and in the meantime, the radio resources distributed over different cellular networks, and base stations should be optimized in a global way to be globally resource-optimized and energy-efficient networks (GREEN). A new framework, called traffic-aware network planning and green operation (TANGO), is proposed toward GREEN. Some key technologies for the migration to TANGO are then presented and evaluated. Theoretical modeling and simulation studies show that TANGO schemes can greatly improve the energy efficiency of cellular networks, while keeping QoS at a satisfactory level.

Prediction of activity session for mobile network use optimization and user experience enhancement

Abstract: Systems and methods for prediction of activity session for mobile network use optimization and user experience enhancement are disclosed. In one aspect, embodiments of the present disclosure include a method, which may be implemented on a system for enhancing user experience with a mobile application on a mobile device including, using user activity characteristics at a mobile device and server activity characteristics of a host server to anticipate a future activity session at the mobile device and transferring impending content from the host server the mobile device to pre-cache content on the mobile device to support predicted data activity for the future activity session that has been predicted.

A Distributed Power Control Scheme for Cellular Network Assisted D2D Communications

Abstract: Device-to-device (D2D) communications underlaying a cellular infrastructure has recently been proposed as a means of increasing the resource utilization, improving the user throughput and extending the battery lifetime of user equipments. In this paper we propose a new distributed power control algorithm that iteratively determines the signal- to-noise-and- interference-ratio (SINR) targets in a mixed cellular and D2D environment and allocates transmit powers such that the overall power consumption is minimized subject to a sum-rate constraint. The performance of the distributed power control algorithm is benchmarked with respect to the optimal SINR target setting that we obtain using the Augmented Lagrangian Penalty Function (ALPF) method. The proposed scheme shows consistently near optimum performance both in a single-input-multiple-output (SIMO) and a multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) setting.

On the Evolution of Mobile Platform Ecosystem Structure and Strategy

Abstract: Platforms have become a core fundament of many technology industries Platforms not only enable new products and services but have also been shown to influence strategies, shape business models, and even transform entire industries Platforms play a particularly important role in the mobile ecosystem The success of smartphones has led to an intense battle of mobile platforms, each looking for ways to become the system of choice for mobile device manufacturers, mobile network operators, and mobile application developers Drawing on theories of platform markets, strategic networks, and business ecosystems, this paper uses a visualization approach to study the evolving global interfirm structure and examines strategies used in the mobile platform ecosystem over the past five years We identify important differences between mobile platform strategies and discuss their implications for both mobile ecosystem participants and the future of the app economy

Capacity and coverage enhancement in heterogeneous networks

Abstract: Disruptive innovations in mobile broadband system design are required to help network providers meet the exponential growth in mobile traffic demand with relatively flat revenues per bit. Heterogeneous network architecture is one of the most promising low-cost approaches to provide significant areal capacity gain and indoor coverage improvement. In this introductory article, we provide a brief overview of heterogeneous network architectures comprising hierarchical multitier multiple radio access technologies (RAT) deployments based on newer infrastructure elements. We begin with presenting possible deployment scenarios of heterogeneous networks to better illustrate the concepts of multitier and multi-RAT. We then focus on multitier deployments with single RAT and investigate the challenges associated with enabling single frequency reuse across tiers. Based on the spectrum usage, heterogeneous networks can be categorized into single carrier usage, where all devices within the network share the same spectrum, and distinct carrier usage, where different types of devices are allocated separate spectra. For single carrier usage, we show that interference management schemes are critical for reducing the resulting cross-tier interference, and present several techniques that provide significant capacity and coverage improvements. The article also describes industry trends, standardization efforts, and future research directions in this rich area of investigation.