Fundamentals of Inter-Cell Overhead Signaling in Heterogeneous Cellular Networks
Heterogeneous base stations (e.g. picocells, microcells, femtocells and distributed antennas) will become increasingly essential for cellular network capacity and coverage. Up until now, little basic research has been done on the fundamentals of managing so many infrastructures - much of it unplanned - together with the carefully planned macrocellular network. Inter-cell coordination is in principle an effective way of ensuring different infrastructure components behave in a way that increases, rather than decreases, the key Quality of Service (QoS) metrics. The success of such coordination depends heavily on how the overhead is shared, and the rate and delay of the overhead sharing.