QuickC: practical sub-millisecond transport for small cells

摘要

Cellular operators want to be able to deploy small cells with the same ease as WiFi access points, to quickly address traffic hotspots in dense urban areas. However, deploying small cells has not been easy. The reason is that due to scarcity of licensed spectrum, small cells need to use the same spectrum as the existing macro cells, and they need to explicitly coordinate their spectrum usage with each other to manage interference. The challenge is that this coordination needs to happen with latencies less than a millisecond, otherwise adding small cells does not help scale the overall network capacity. Implementing such tight coordination in dense urban deployments has not been easy in practice.