Abstract: |
Telco operators view network densification as a viable solution for the challenging goals set for the next generation cellular networks. Among other goals, network densification would help accomodating the always increasing mobile demand or would allow to considerably reduce connection latency. Nevertheless, along with network densification, many issues arise. For example, sever inter-cell interference (ICI) may considerably limit network capacity if coordination among base stations is not used. To tackle such a problem, we focus on the well-known Almost Blank Sub-Frame (ABS or ABSF) solution. With ABSF, in order to reduce interference, not all the base stations are allowed to transmit at the same time. In this talk, we question the ability of ABSF of improving both aggregate system throughput and transmission efficiency and we show how ABSF may purse some other different objectives. In contrast, we show that a better way of improving system throughput is enabling Device-to-Device communications among UEs and opportunistic forwarding. Therefore, we propose a novel mechanism (OBS) that exploits and coordinates simultaneously ABSF and opportunistic forwarding to improve system throughput and user fairness. Our approach has been validated against state of the art approaches through an extensive simulation campaign, even using real data from a network operator. |