Cooperation and cognition in heterogeneous wireless networks

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As increased wireless data traffic has placed great strain on the limited bandwidth resources in cellular networks, both industry and academic researchers have searched for means to improve reliability and throughput. This has led to the development of the paradigm of heterogeneous networks. In heterogeneous networks, wireless access is provided by a wide variety of network topologies such as micro-, pico- and femto-cells. The traditional cellular infrastructure is accessed only as a last resort. The key is to bring the access point close to the user, leading to savings in power used, but more importantly, in bandwidth reuse. While an intuitive concept, heterogeneous networks raise many difficult practical and theoretical questions that have, so far, been unanswered. Key questions that we aim to answer are the ability of these networks to co-exist, resource allocation and scalability. In addition, we plan to bring into the design and analysis the use of a new class of networks: mobile access points. The heterogeneous networks mentioned so far are hierarchical and must share the limited bandwidth resources available. In the context of the next-generation of networks, likely based on orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) - especially, the Long Term Evolution (LTE) class of standards, resource allocation includes both allocating physical resource blocks (PRBs) across networks and determining transmission power levels. The resource allocation problem is a fundamental limiting factor in heterogeneous networks and finding efficient and effective solutions will be a key driver in this project. We will investigate issues of cooperation amongst nodes, handoffs and resource allocation in the context of scalability. We will investigate cognition to address these issues. Furthermore, we will investigate cross-layer designs due to latency and the impact on the wired backhaul.