LTE-Advanced heterogeneous networks: Release 10 and beyond

With the basic features necessary to support Heterogeneous Networks now being incorporated into LTE-Advanced, the next step is to look forward to future evolution of Heterogeneous Networks. While active and extensive discussions are presently progressing in the 3GPP standards community, this paper first provides a review of the current LTE-Advance capability and specification support and an overview of the likely development and trends for the future specifications. Deployments of heterogeneous networks now provides operators an important tool to address growing traffic demand beyond the planned initial network roll-out. This will eventually leads to comparison to and advancement towards coordinated multipoint transmissions and receptions as a possible evolution path from the Release 10 co-channel single point transmission and reception technique. The paper explores the possible enhancements and different evolution paths highlighting their benefits and challenges.