Second Workshop on Cooperative Heterogeneous Networks (coHetNet 2012) in conjunction with ICCCN 2012.

http://www.icccn.org/icccn12/

The proliferation of new applications, e.g., mobile TV, Internet gaming, large file transfer, and the development of user terminals, e.g., smart phones, notebooks, has dramatically increased user traffic and network load. Moreover, with the number of wireless subscribers expected to triple over the next five years, it is obvious that current networks will not be able to satisfy customer demands in the near future. In order to meet this traffic growth and provide service to their customers, vendors and operators are working on the development of new technologies and cellular standards. Within them, heterogeneity in network deployment has been heralded as the most promising way of increasing both the coverage and the capacity of future wireless systems. Thus, it is expected that new elements such as remote radio heads, picocells, femtocells, and relay nodes will be deployed overlying macrocells. Therefore, future networks are expected to be heterogeneous. In this way, networks will be closer to users, and system capacity will be enhanced through a better spatial spectrum reuse.

However, although HetNets are envisioned to support the increasing data traffic demand and meet the requirements imposed for the fourth generation of mobile networks, they also lead to new technical challenges never faced before. For example, due to the larger number of cells and thus of cell boundaries, the management of interference becomes an intricate problem. Since centralized network planning and optimization cannot deal with the individualistic nature of user-deployed cells, e.g., femtocells, a key to the success of HetNets is the cooperation between nodes in a decentralized and distributed manner. Such cooperation is the only way to ensure a proper network operation. However, cooperation is not easy to achieve due to different issues and threats imposed by the network itself, e.g., limited back-haul capabilities, dynamics of traffic and radio channel, energy consumption, operational costs, etc.

The target of this workshop is to bring together academic and industrial researchers to identify and discuss all recent challenges and developments related to cooperation in HetNets, and establish future research directions. Topics of interest include but are not limited to the following:

- Collaborative techniques in macro/pico/femto-cellular networks
- Performance modeling and simulation for HetNets
- Cooperative communications between HetNet nodes.
- Downlink and uplink PHY/MAC design for cooperative HetNets.
- Self-configuration, self-optimization and self-healing in HetNets.
- Cognitive radio techniques in HetNets.
- Mobility management in HetNets.
- Load balancing in HetNets.
- Restricted access versus open-access for low-power HetNet nodes.
- Interference analysis, mitigation and avoidance in HetNets.
- Power saving mechanism in HetNets.
- Distributed radio resource management in cooperative HetNets.
- Cooperative sensing techniques and feedback in HetNets.
- Remote radio heads planning and deployment.
- Expanded region picocells planning and deployment.
- Cooperative relaying in HetNets.
- eICIC techniques in LTE-Advanced HetNets.
- MIMO techniques in HetNets.
- Positioning and tracking systems based on HetNets.