Efficient resources for telecommunications
One of the main challenges in heterogeneous networks is to manage interference between different wireless elements. To this end, new approaches for easy co-existence are urgently required to efficiently allocate resources. The EU-funded project 'Cooperative multipoint transmission for interference coordination' (COMIC) sought to mitigate interference in such networks based on efficient scheduling and special signal processing techniques. The uplink was modelled as a multiple access channel (MAC) and the downlink as a broadcast channel (BC). To reduce the effect of interference in MACs, scientists focused on a specific technique that is known as successive interference cancellation (SIC). Then, using certain duality between the MAC and the BC, the parameters of the SIC technique were used to compute the parameters of dirty-paper coding (DPC), which is the optimum transmission technique for the BC. COMIC proposed an optimal algorithm to serve users with a certain target quality of service in heterogeneous networks. Although such networks are still ideal, this algorithm was practical. Work was also geared toward realising cooperative multipoint (COMP) schedulers for efficiently allocating resources. Project members managed to develop a femtocell for a long-term evolution network with COMP capabilities. Project results were published in two journal papers relating to fair resource allocation in heterogeneous networks, and two conference papers describing the algorithm.
Keywords
Resource allocation, heterogeneous network, multiple access channel, broadcast channel successive interference cancellation, cooperative multipoint,
