UTRAN Long Term Evolution (LTE) release 8 (Rel'8) is now finalized by 3GPP and includes numerous new technology features such as Multiple Input Multiple Output antenna technology (MIMO), Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) and native support for scalable bandwidth configurations of up to 20 MHz.

 LTE-Advanced, an evolved version of LTE, is currently under investigation in order to fulfill the requirements defined by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) for next generation mobile communication systems, known as International Mobile Telecommunications - Advanced systems (IMT-Adv).  The goal is to provide peak-data-rates in the order of 1Gbit/s in local areas. Such high data rates require extremely spectrum allocation in the range of 100MHz with an unparalleled spectral efficiency of 10bps/Hz. Here the 100 MHz system bandwidth will be achieved via aggregation of individual component carriers.

Designers of cellular systems have consistently and successfully been able to increase the overall system spectral efficiency. However, improving it for all users and not just for the few best ones remains a challenging task. Hot-zones, i.e. the deployment of cheap low-power base stations (eNBs) in local areas can help providing convenient access to high data rates to a larger share of users, and is therefore expected to become very popular in the near future.

Local area environments include indoor office scenarios, apartment complexes, or outdoor hotspot scenarios with several low-power eNBs. Assuming uncoordinated eNB deployments, i.e. without prior network planning, inter-cell interference conditions will be significantly different from those observed in standard macro cell networks with planned and optimized site locations. Therefore the optimal system configuration will often be found to be different from universal frequency reuse where all eNBs always have unrestricted access to the entire LTE-Advanced system bandwidth. The optimal configuration, among other factors, will depend on the offered traffic, interference coupling among neighboring cells and distribution of terminals (UEs), which are all likely to be time-variant.

In this project we aim at investigating practical solutions that will ultimately enable self-organizing LTE-Advanced systems, not requiring prior (expensive & manual) network planning. A set of rules, (a policy) will prevent so-called greedy eNBs from using all the available component carriers for their own sake, even when this results in intolerable interference to the neighboring cells.