Femtocells, Interference Coordination & Next-Generation Wireless Systems

April 27, 2010
Sundeep Rangan | Polytechnic Institute of NYU

Recent years, have witnessed an explosive demand for cellular wireless data – a trend that is not abating. Cisco, for example, estimates that wireless data may grow by as much as 38 fold by 2013. Meeting this demand affordably presents a major challenge for cellular operators and wireless engineers.

One promising new technology for deploying radically cheaper networks is femtocells, which are small (typically < 1W) base stations installed in the customer’s premises. With their smaller form factor, self-configuration capabilities, and ability to leverage the customer’s backhaul, femtocells can be deployed at a fraction of the cost of traditional macrocellular networks.

This talk will discuss a number of the technical challenges concerning femtocells, with a focus on problems of interference coordination. Devices in mixed femto / macro deployments often experience strong interference conditions not well-handled by traditional cellular power control. We offer alternative interference coordination methods based on subband scheduling – a new technique available in 4G cellular systems.

Speaker Details

Dr. Sundeep Rangan is currently a Director of Engineering at Qualcomm Flarion Technologies. He received the B.A.Sc. degree from the University of Waterloo in 1992 and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California, Berkeley in 1995 and 1997, respectively, all in electrical engineering. In 1998, he joined Bell Labs where he worked on the development of a novel OFDM-based cellular data system. That project was spun-off in 2000 to form Flarion Technologies to commercialize the system and Dr. Rangan was a co-founder (with four others). Flarion grew to over 150 employees with trials with leading carriers worldwide. Flarion was acquired by Qualcomm in 2006, where Dr. Rangan now works on next-generation wireless infrastructure products. Dr. Rangan’s research interests are in wireless communications, information theory, control and signal processing.