Thanks to their ability to enhance transmission quality by offloading LTE Evolved Node Base Station (eNB) traffic, Home eNB (HeNB) deployment has progressed dramatically in recent years. Despite this popularity, the deployment of HeNBs has also introduced a new set of resource inefficiency problems, caused mainly by inter-cell interference and indoor traffic load fluctuation. A large body of previous work has been devoted to improving the utilization of network resources in HeNBs, including, frequency planning, time division, power control, and space division. Nevertheless, many problems not addressed adequately by these studies remain open, in particular those related to communication overhead, computational complexity, and service quality.

In the absence of standardized re...[ Read more ]

Thanks to their ability to enhance transmission quality by offloading LTE Evolved Node Base Station (eNB) traffic, Home eNB (HeNB) deployment has progressed dramatically in recent years. Despite this popularity, the deployment of HeNBs has also introduced a new set of resource inefficiency problems, caused mainly by inter-cell interference and indoor traffic load fluctuation. A large body of previous work has been devoted to improving the utilization of network resources in HeNBs, including, frequency planning, time division, power control, and space division. Nevertheless, many problems not addressed adequately by these studies remain open, in particular those related to communication overhead, computational complexity, and service quality.

In the absence of standardized resource allocation mechanisms for LTE HeNBs, in this work we focus on designing effective solutions to the resource allocation problem in HeNB networks; and address three operational environments: i) open-access enterprise networks, ii) closed-access residential networks, and iii) open-access residential networks.

First, we focus on improving the resource utilization in centrally-controlled open-access enterprise networks such as enterprise HeNB networks and Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN). To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first to jointly optimize user association, antenna beam selection, link scheduling, and power adaptation in such networks. We proposed a unified conflict-free scheduling algorithm, that can be directly implemented in HeNB networks, and also designed a coordination protocol, the so-called TD-CSMA protocol to enable deployment over uncoordinated WLAN MAC protocol.

Next, identifying the difficulty of implementing X-2 interfaces among HeNBs, we proposed fully distributed resource allocation solutions for non-cooperative distributed closed-access residential networks. We introduced a self-learning HeNB MAC protocol to mitigate interference by relying on historical user feedback. The learning process is modelled as a cluster-structural regret-based learning game, where the users within one HeNB form a cluster to share information.

Finally, we examined the problem of the energy cost of running a massive number of always-on HeNBs worldwide and focused on designing an energy efficient, Quality of Servic (QoS) constrained MAC protocol for cooperative distributed open-access residential HeNB networks. Since most previous work has failed to properly consider interference mitigation when designing such protocols, we manipulate user association and Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) scheduling with a combination of interference mitigation measures. Within a potential game framework, we proposed iterative algorithms guaranteed to converge based on inter-HeNB communication.