Cognitive Multicast Pilot Scheduling for Heterogeneous Networks

With the increasing convergence and cooperation among wireless networks, network awareness of user equipment (UE) has become very important. A practical solution for network information delivery for UE, Cognitive Pilot Channel (CPC), has recently been proposed. It can provide UE with the necessary network information for network selection by using the public signaling channel. In this paper, a cognitive multicast CPC scheme is proposed. It can greatly improve the on-demand CPC delivery efficiency, and also reduce the time delay of information delivery. The cognitive characteristics of the proposed multicast CPC scheme can easily be adapted to different heterogeneous network architectures.