Virtual Cells: Enhancing the Resource Allocation Efficiency for TD-LTE

This paper introduces the concept of virtual cells in Time-Division Long Term Evolution (TD-LTE) systems, which enables users residing in overlapping cells´ coverage regions to utilize resources from multiple base stations. The benefits of virtual cells are realized by the efficient resource utilization, via adapting the network resource availability with the traffic demand taking also into account the impact of cross-slot interference. Besides the increased resource flexibility, virtual cells also resolve pseudo congestion, and introduce a customized, user specific, resource utilization. Such a feature enables mobile users to utilize sub-frames from different base stations creating on demand virtual frame. A simulation study elaborates the benefits of our approach, and demonstrates the performance enhancements in comparison with the conventional TD-LTE configurations.