A conversation about densification with Ozgun Y. Bursalioglu, senior researcher at DOCOMO Innovations
The below is only a summary. Download a transcript of the complete interview and the full report “Massively densified networks. Why we need them and how we can build them.”
Densification changes the intercell site dynamics. We talked about these changes and how they are driving a shift from cell-centric to user-centric networks with Ozgun Y. Bursalioglu, senior researcher at DOCOMO Innovations.
In a user-centric network, Ozgun told us, “we have all these new small-cell base stations, or remote-radio-head distributed antenna systems. In this case, the user, in theory, doesn’t have to know where the signal comes from. He might just need a unique cell ID that enables the device to connect to any cell covering that location.”
“This helps with the handoff procedures,” Ozgun continued. “When you densify the network, cells get very close to each other and the number of handoffs grows. Trying to switch from one base station to the next base station takes lots of time. It will have a huge overhead, and we don’t want that. We would want a user device to seamlessly connect in a fluid way to all of the transmission points around it. Now, if you are trying to arrange the connection to a cell every time you realize, ‘OK, I’m getting a signal from this cell,’ it may become a big mess if you do it very often. Instead, with a unique cell ID, you have these joint points around you that are doing transmissions, but somehow you see them as a single point, like a single cell. That helps with saving the time, the training and, of course, eventually the throughput.”
We further discussed the topic of densification during our recent webinar. Download the webinar.
