Self-organizing and self-healing mechanisms in cooperative small-cell networks

Small-cell networks are expected as one of key solutions for high system capacity. However, self-organizing and self-healing mechanisms are necessarily required to deploy and manage an increasing number of small-cell networks. In this paper, we consider a future small-cell network as an intelligent distributed antenna system such as an adaptive array antenna. We propose a self-organizing mechanism and a self-healing mechanism for small-cell networks through cooperative clusters. We evaluate the system performance in terms of resource utilization in both normal and failure cases of a small-cell network. The results show that proposed mechanisms outperform the conventional mechanisms.