Scope

As the tremendous increase of the number of mobile users and the use of diverse wireless applications, the demands of wireless access to the Internet are also exponentially increased. As a consequence, not only the volumes of mobile data traffic overwhelm the capacity of existing wireless communication networks but the required high data rates also drain the limited radio resources. Theoretically, solution to this problem is to broaden the amount of allocated spectrum. However, spectrum for commercial use solely in the conventional licensed bands or ISM unlicensed bands is no longer enough to support the practical needs, which decreases the approachability of this solution and renders the interests of network operators. Hence, heterogeneous carrier communication technologies receive lots of attention from both industry and academy for data communications and telecommunications in recent years.

Heterogeneous carrier communication technologies enable the network to operate not only on homogeneous carriers. Instead, communications may be extended to carriers with different characteristics. For example, in licensed-assisted access (LAA) of LTE (also known as LTE-U), both licensed and unlicensed carriers are involved in, where licensed carriers are used for control channels, while unlicensed carriers are used for data channels. For IEEE 802.11 af, communications are no longer carrying out on ISM bands and are extended to TV bands. For IEEE 802.11 ac (also known as the fifth generation of WiFi), a higher order modulation (256-QAM), wider bandwidth (up to 160MHz), and 8X8 MIMO are adopted for indoor communications. Furthermore, communications using mmWave carriers recently also receive considerable attention due to the favor of wide available bandwidth. These innovative technologies although provide new communication paradigms enjoying wider bandwidth and/or stronger signal strength, they also suffer from unprecedented challenges.


Topics of Interest

The goal of this workshop is consequently to bring together academic and industrial researchers in an effort to identify and discuss the major technical challenges, recent results, and future research issues related to existing and emerging technologies for heterogeneous carrier communication. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • LAA in LTE (LTE-U) Technology
  • Evolving of IEEE 802.11 (e.g., ac, af, ax), IEEE 802.15, IEEE 802.16, IEEE 802.22
  • Communications on mmWave carriers
  • Interference and radio resource managements for heterogeneous carrier communications
  • Cloud (heterogeneous) radio access network architecture supporting heterogeneous carriers
  • PHY/MAC/network layer design
  • QoS, energy efficiency, spectrum efficiency issues
  • Offloading, handoff, and network selection among heterogeneous carriers
  • Coexistence of heterogeneous carriers technologies
  • Emerging applications and services, standardization progress, modeling and simulation methods, and performance evaluation

Important Dates

Paper Submission
15 Jul 2015 (FIRM DEADLINE)
Accept Notification
01 Sep 2015
Final manuscript
01 Oct 2015
Workshop
TBD