ABSTRACT
The availability of wireless connections is changing the way people interact and communicate and this has brought about a drastic increase in the number of wireless devices as well as the introduction of a vast amount of applications covering heterogeneous areas, from smart cities to smart offices, from advertisement to industrial automation, and so on. Such applications have led to an increasing demand for more bandwidth and have dictated the need for more powerful and faster networks. As a consequence, network operators need novel solutions to enhance the traditional architecture and coverage paradigms that are becoming increasingly overwhelmed. To this aim, cell densification, where small (e.g., pico and femto) cells are deployed to increase the coverage of existing macro cells, is a viable solution to effectively handle the extremely huge traffic load of future mobile networks (Andrews et al., 2012). Nevertheless, denser deployments open new challenges (for instance, in terms of interference management, intercell coordination, spectrum allocation, control, and data planes management), which thus call for the adoption of more efficient approaches to network design to guarantee high reliability, flexibility, and low latency.
