Data-Driven Deployment and Cooperative Self-Organization in Ultra-Dense Small Cell Networks

Ultra-dense small-cell network is widely acknowledged as a key enabler for high capacity wireless networks. Some of the key challenges that ultra-dense networks face are profitable deployment distribution under complex traffic loads and efficient radio resource management (RRM) in excessive interference environments. Poor small-cell deployment locations can lead to excessive interference without clear profit margins and inefficient resource utilization. As such, data-driven small-cell deployment and self-organizing RRM of small-cell clusters are regarded as the two main technologies that can improve ultra-dense small-cell services. This paper first reviews the latest research in data-driven small-cell deployment using structured and unstructured social media data. A combination of irregular clustering techniques is used to identify hotspots, and natural language processing algorithms are used to identify blackspots. This paper then reviews recent advances in self-organization of small-cell RRM and analyzes how data can improve self-organization performance. Moreover, the idea of cooperative self-organization is introduced to further promote the self-organization capability. Finally, two ultra-dense small-cell RRM case studies are presented to demonstrate the performance which improves of cooperative self-organization.