• ETRI Journal
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• v.38 no.2
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• pp.314-325
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• 2016

This paper examines the resource gain that can be obtained from the creation of clusters of nodes in densely populated areas. A single node within each such cluster is designated as a "hotspot"; all other nodes then communicate with a destination node, such as a base station, through such hotspots. We propose a semi-distributed algorithm, referred to as coordinated cognitive tethering (CCT), which clusters all nodes and coordinates hotspots to tether over locally available white spaces. CCT performs the following these steps: (a) groups nodes based on a modified k-means clustering algorithm; (b) assigns white-space spectrum to each cluster based on a distributed graph-coloring approach to maximize spectrum reuse, and (c) allocates physical-layer resources to individual users based on local channel information. Unlike small cells (for example, femtocells and WiFi), this approach does not require any additions to existing infrastructure. In addition to providing parallel service to more users than conventional direct communication in cellular networks, simulation results show that CCT can increase the average battery life of devices by 30%, on average.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.39B no.2
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• pp.61-74
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• 2014

In recent years, development of femtocells are receiving considerable attention towards increasing the network coverage, capacity, and improvement in the quality of service for users. In 3GPP LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) system, to efficiently utilize the bandwidth, femtocell and macro cell uses the same frequency band, but this deployment poses a technical challenge of cross-tier interference to macro users. In this paper, the novel quality of service based fractional power control (QoS-FPC) scheme under the heterogeneous networks environment is proposed, which considers the users priority and QoS-requirements during the power allocation. The proposed QoS-FPC scheme has two focal points: firs, it protects the macrocell users uplink communication by limiting the cross-tier interference at eNB below a given threshold, and second, it ensures the optimization of femtocell users power allocation at each power adjustment phase. Performance gain is demonstrated with extensive system-level simulations to show that the proposed QoS-FPC scheme significantly decreases the cross-tier intereference and improves the overall users throughput.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.42 no.2
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• pp.175-185
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• 2020

Inter-cell interference (ICI) is a major problem in heterogeneous networks, such as two-tier femtocell (FC) networks, because it leads to poor cell-edge throughput and system capacity. Dynamic ICI coordination (ICIC) schemes, which do not require prior frequency planning, must be employed for interference avoidance in such networks. In contrast to existing dynamic ICIC schemes that focus on homogeneous network scenarios, we propose a novel semi-distributed dynamic ICIC scheme to mitigate interference in heterogeneous network scenarios. With the goal of maximizing the utility of individual users, two separate algorithms, namely the FC base station (FBS)-level algorithm and FC management system (FMS)-level algorithm, are employed to restrict resource usage by dominant interference-creating cells. The distributed functionality of the FBS-level algorithm and low computational complexity of the FMS-level algorithm are the main advantages of the proposed scheme. Simulation results demonstrate improvement in cell-edge performance with no impact on system capacity or user fairness, which confirms the effectiveness of the proposed scheme compared to static and semi-static ICIC schemes.

• 한국정보통신설비학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2008.08a
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• pp.237-241
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• 2008

Femtocells are cellular access points that connect to a mobile operator's network using residential DSL or cable broadband connections. They have been developed to work with a range of different cellular standards including CDMA, GSM and UMTS. Like legacy base station, the frequency accuracy and phase alignment is necessary for ensuring the quality of service (QoS) for applications such as voice, real-time video, wireless hand-off, and data over a converged access medium at the femtocell. But, the GPS has some problem to be used at the femtocell, because it is difficult to set-up, depends on the satellite condition, and very expensive. So, some techniques are discussed to alternate with the legacy GPS system. NTP, PTP, Synchronous Ethernet use the ethernet to synchronize distributed clocks in packet networks. AGPS support reliable position information than the legacy GPS in poor signal conditions. But, These method also have some problems. So, hybrid timing method like A-GPS+PTP and TV+GPS was developed to make up the weak point of GPS. This paper introduces the each method and compare each other and y propose much better solution for timing synchronization at the Femtocell

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.1638-1654
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• 2018

The heterogeneous network (HetNet) has been one of the key technologies in Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) with growing capacity and coverage demands. However, the introduction of femtocells has brought serious co-layer interference and cross-layer interference, which has been a major factor affecting system throughput. It is generally acknowledged that the resource allocation has significant impact on suppressing interference and improving the system performance. In this paper, we propose a hybrid-clustering algorithm based on the $Mat{\acute{e}}rn$ hard-core process (MHP) to restrain two kinds of co-channel interference in the HetNet. As the impracticality of the hexagonal grid model and the homogeneous Poisson point process model whose points distribute completely randomly to establish the system model. The HetNet model based on the MHP is adopted to satisfy the negative correlation distribution of base stations in this paper. Base on the system model, the spectrum sharing problem with restricted spectrum resources is further analyzed. On the basis of location information and the interference relation of base stations, a hybrid clustering method, which takes into accounts the fairness of two types of base stations is firstly proposed. Then, auction mechanism is discussed to achieve the spectrum sharing inside each cluster, avoiding the spectrum resource waste. Through combining the clustering theory and auction mechanism, the proposed novel algorithm can be applied to restrain the cross-layer interference and co-layer interference of HetNet, which has a high density of base stations. Simulation results show that spectral efficiency and system throughput increase to a certain degree.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.11 no.7
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• pp.3370-3392
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• 2017

Next Generation Beyond 4G/5G systems will rely on the deployment of small cells over conventional macrocells for achieving high spectral efficiency and improved coverage performance, especially for indoor and hotspot environments. In such heterogeneous networks, the expected performance gains can only be derived with the use of efficient interference coordination schemes, such as Fractional Frequency Reuse (FFR), which is very attractive for its simplicity and effectiveness. In this work, femtocells are deployed according to a spatial Poisson Point Process (PPP) over hexagonally shaped, 6-sector macro base stations (MeNBs) in an uncoordinated manner, operating in hybrid mode. A newly introduced intermediary region prevents cross-tier, cross-boundary interference and improves user equipment (UE) performance at the boundary of cell center and cell edge. With tools of stochastic geometry, an analytical framework for the signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio (SINR) distribution is developed to evaluate the performance of all UEs in different spatial locations, with consideration to both co-tier and cross-tier interference. Using the SINR distribution framework, average network throughput per tier is derived together with a newly proposed harmonic mean, which ensures fairness in resource allocation amongst all UEs. Finally, the FFR network parameters are optimized for maximizing average network throughput, and the harmonic mean using a fair resource assignment constraint. Numerical results verify the proposed analytical framework, and provide insights into design trade-offs between maximizing throughput and user fairness by appropriately adjusting the spatial partitioning thresholds, the spectrum allocation factor, and the femtocell density.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.37B no.12
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• pp.1102-1112
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• 2012

We propose a cell selection and resource allocation scheme that assigns users to nearby accessible cells in heterogeneous wireless networks consisting of macrocell, femtocells, and Wi-Fi access points, under overload situation. Given the current power level of all accessible cells nearby users, the proposed scheme finds all possible cell assignment mappings of which user should connect to which cell to maximize the number of users that the network can accommodate at the same time. We formulate the cell selection problem with heterogeneous cells into an optimization problem of binary integer programming, and compute the optimal solution. We evaluate the proposed algorithm in terms of network access failure compared to a local ad-hoc based cell selection scheme used in practical systems using network level simulations. We demonstrate that our cell selection algorithm dramatically reduces network access failure in overload situation by fully leveraging network resources evenly across heterogeneous networks. We also validate the practical feasibility in terms of computational complexity of our binary integer program by measuring the computation time with respect to the number of users.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.36 no.1B
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• pp.21-28
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• 2011

The femtocell is a miniaturized Base Station (BS) with low-cost and low-power using general broadband access network as backhaul. It is expected not only to improve indoor coverage but also to reduce a service charge. However, in IEEE 802,16e femtocells, when the Mobile Station (MS) scans neighbor BSs for handover, it takes a long time due to too many number of femto BSs. Also the size of the neighbor advertisement message that will be periodically sent by a serving BS is increased as the number of target femto BSs for scanning increases. In this paper, we proposed an efficient femtocell scanning scheme, using a triangulation mechanism and a femto BS monitoring scheme to reduce the number of scanning operations and the size of the neighbor advertisement messages. The proposed scheme can avoid wasting air resources and reduce scanning overheads by minimal scanning operation. The simulation results showed that the proposed scheme could improve scanning performance and avoid wasting air resources, compared with the conventional scheme of the IEEE 802.16e system.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.10 no.11
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• pp.5400-5418
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• 2016

Femtocells are envisioned as a key solution to embrace the ever-increasing high data rate and thus are extensively deployed. However, the dense and random deployments of femtocell access points (FAPs) induce severe intercell inference that in turn may degrade the performance of spectral efficiency. Hence, unrestrained proliferation of FAPs may not acquire a net throughput gain. Besides, given that numerous FAPs deployed in ultra-dense networks (UDNs) lead to significant energy consumption, the amount of FAPs deployed is worthy of more considerations. Nevertheless, little existing works present an analytical result regarding the optimal FAP density for a given User Equipment (UE) density. This paper explores the realistic scenario of randomly distributed FAPs in UDN and derives the coverage probability via Stochastic Geometry. From the analytical results, coverage probability is strictly increasing as the FAP-to-UE ratio increases, yet the growing rate of coverage probability decreases as the ratio grows. Therefore, we can consider a specific FAP-to-UE ratio as the point where further increasing the ratio is not cost-effective with regards to the requirements of communication systems. To reach the optimal FAP density, we can deploy FAPs in line with peak traffic and randomly switch off FAPs to keep the optimal ratio during off-peak hours. Furthermore, considering the unbalanced nature of traffic demands in the temporal and spatial domain, dynamically and carefully choosing the locations of active FAPs would provide advantages over randomization. Besides, with a huge FAP density in UDN, we have more potential choices for the locations of active FAPs and this adds to the demand for a strategic sleeping policy.

• Journal of Communications and Networks
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.312-320
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• 2013

Home evolved Node-B (HeNB), also called a femtocell or a femto base station, is introduced to provide high data rate to indoor users. However, two main problems arise in femtocell networks: (1) Small coverage area of HeNB, which results in limited cell-splitting gain and ping-pong handover (HO) problems and (2) high inter-femtocell interference because HeNBs may be densely deployed in a small region. In this study, an efficient cooperation mechanism called an HeNB-aided virtual-HO (HaVHO) scheme is proposed to expand the coverage area of femtocells and to reduce inter-femtocell interference. The cooperation among neighbor HeNBs is exploited in HaVHO by enabling an HeNB to relay the data of its neighbor HeNB without an HO. The HaVHO procedure is compatible with the existing long term evolution specification, and the information exchange overhead in HaVHO is relatively low. To estimate the signal to interference plus noise ratio improvement, the area average channel state metric is proposed, and the amount of user throughput enhancement by HaVHO is derived. System-level simulation shows that HaVHO has a better performance than the other four schemes, such as lesser radio link failure, lesser ping-pong handover, lesser short-stay handover, and higher user throughput.