On the efficient utilization of radio resources in extremely dense wireless networks

The emergence of popular wireless technologies such as LTE and WiFi, and the exponential growth in the usage of these technologies, has led to extremely dense wireless networks. There are many proposals for coping with such densification. In particular, we evaluate the compound effect of inter-cell interference schemes and spectrum efficient intra-cell relay techniques, which have been individually proposed recently as separate solutions. We provide a jointly coordinated intracell and inter-cell resource allocation mechanism that opportunistically exploits network density as a resource. We show that intracell opportunistic relay, based on WiFi communications, reduces the complexity of Inter-Cell Interference Coordination (ICIC) and boosts the efficiency of ICIC in LTE. The superiority of the proposed solution to the legacy cellular network operation is proven via simulations.