Small Cell Deployment Challenges in Ultradense Networks: Architecture and Resource Management

The industries today, are undergoing transformational changes as a result of the growing demand for ubiquitous connectivity. To meet the increasing demand every day, loads of reengineering is required to achieve best-fitted architecture to accommodate more devices, ways to manage available resources, enhanced radio technologies, etc. to deliver more coverage and capacity. This paper aims to study and present different critical features of small cell and ultradense networks. The scope is to summarize various deployment scenarios and challenges. Broadly, the challenges w.r.t resource management, developing flexible architecture, managing the available spectrum and also the use of unlicensed spectrum, etc. will be addressed. The shortcomings in available resource management, interference awareness techniques, spectrum management, etc. will be summarized with different potential technologies. For small cells, it is necessary to understand its interaction with the macro network to demonstrate the overall user experience. Thus, this work will present an elaborated picture of small cell evolution followed by the radio access network (RAN) architecture to achieve a full-heterogeneous and centralized network.