A low-latency control plane for dense cellular networks

Abstract

In order to keep up with the increasing demands for capacity, cellular networks are becoming increasingly dense and heterogeneous. Dense deployments are expected to provide a linear capacity scaling with the number of small cells deployed due to spatial reuse gains. However in practice network capacity is severely limited in dense networks due to interference. The primary reason is that the current LTE control plane deployment model has very high latency and is unable to cope with the demand of implementing interference management techniques that require coordination on a millisecond timeframe. This paper presents SwiftC, a novel low-latency control plane design for LTE networks. SwiftC's novel contribution is a design for efficiently sending and receiving control plane messages over the LTE spectrum itself, thus creating a direct and low-latency coordination signaling link between small cells and the macrocell. SwiftC builds on recent work in full duplex radios and shows via prototype implementations that a low latency control plane can be built over the existing LTE network without wasting licensed spectrum. We also show the benefits of SwiftC in implementing complex interference management techniques, and show that with SwiftC small cell deployments can achieve almost a linear capacity scaling with every small cell deployed.