Small Cells World Summit (#SCWS14) Video and Summary Articles

The Small Cells World Summit concluded last week. The main highlight was the Release 4 of Small Cell Forum on Urban, building on top of Release 3 - Urban foundations



Around 20 new documents have been published, available here on this release. Land Mobile has more details about this launch by Small Cell Forum here.

There were couple of interesting videos from the event by ThinkSmallCell and ConvergeDigest, they are embedded below:





Other related links (new links will be added as and when available):

• Airvana Is Back With a 'Cloud RAN' 4G Biz Cell - Light Reading
• Urban Jungle Is Still Too Wild for Small Cells - Light Reading
• Small Cell Forum Tackles Urban, Virtualization - Light Reading
• This is not the small cell you are looking for: why ip.access' presenceCell will make operators money by rejecting users - TMN Magazine
• Operators hoping for small cell "Sweet Spots" - Mobile Europe
• Mini cell towers: The end of crappy phone service - CNN
• SCWS: small cell sectors seeks diversity without fragmentation - Maravedis-Rethink
• Small Cells World Summit 2014 Event Report - ThinkSmallCell

X2: The necessity for Interoperability and Interference management in HetNets

Recently I wrote an article in the TMN magazine here about HetNet co-ordination. One important point that I mentioned here (and in several of the trainings that I do) is that X2 can be quite a useful interface, especially when you want to manage Interference between just macro cells or between different types of cells, as in HetNet environment. From the TMN article:

The initial deployments of LTE did not pay too much emphasis on X2 interface being present. Inter-operability was another issue for which X2 didn’t work very well. One of the major benefits of having an X2 interface is that different base stations or eNodeB’s (hereafter referred to as just eNB’s) can talk to each other and coordinate to make sure interference is kept at the minimum, especially on the cell edges. The Macro-cell’s had the provision for the X2 interface from the beginning, which formed the basis for Inter-Cell Interference Coordination (ICIC). Initially, the Small-cell’s didn’t have a facility for an X2 interface amongst them or with the Macro-cell. The support of X2 for Small-cell’s was added in 3GPP Release-10 and 3GPP Relese-11 (hereafter referred to as just Release-10 and Release-11) as seen in the picture. X2 for Small-cell’s is crucial for Interference management in HetNets.

The Small Cell Forum just published a whitepaper called "X2 interoperability in multi-vendor X2 HetNets". This paper is quite interesting with just the right amount of details. In their own words:

A key area of standardization needed to support small cells relates to the procedures to assist co-ordination with macrocells over LTE’s ‘X2’ interface. This document surveys standards currently in place to support frequency domain interference coordination,time domain interference coordination, mobility robustness and mobility load balancing. 

The whitepaper is available to download from here and is embedded below:

Small Cell Forum Release 4: X2 Interoperability from Zahid Ghadialy

The role of Small Cells, CoMP and Massive MIMO in 5G

Embedded below is a recent paper from IEEE Communications Magazine on the role of various techniques in 5G. The main focus is achieving higher spectral efficiency. From the paper: "From a high-level perspective, there are three main contributors to reaching higher spectral efficiency: advanced interference mitigation, small cells for densification of the network nodes, and massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO), that is, a significant increase in the number of antennas at the base station and potentially also at the terminal."