Future radio access networks focus on lower latency and higher throughputs and mobility for the user. Whereas MIMO communications have represented a significant step forward in recent years, current standardization efforts recognize the importance of interference and multi-user aspects, and emphasize cooperation and coordination. To this end, cellular systems such as LTE-Advanced consider the introduction of novel communication ingredients such as fixed relays and network based multi-cell cooperation. Other standards consider mobile relaying and peer-to-peer (P2P) communications. The heterogeneity of future networks forces one to consider coexistence and internetworking of cellular and femtocell systems.

Mobile information devices contain radio interfaces implementing an increasing number of communications standards. They are thus capable to exploit these heterogeneous communications infrastructures, comprising for instance 2G, 3G, 3GPPLTE, Wi-Fi and WiMAX. Moreover, mobile devices will have available P2P communications capabilities.

The availability of position information plays an increasing role in mobile wireless communications networks already today and will be an integral part of future systems. These systems inherently can offer the ability for stand-alone positioning especially in situations where conventional satellite based positioning systems fail, such as GPS in steep urban canyons or indoor environments. In this framework, positioning information is an important enabler for both location and context-aware services, but also for the improvement of the communications system itself.

Several techniques have been investigated, and continue to be improved by exploiting positioning information, for the coordination of cell sites and the cooperation between them, including cooperation between femto and macro cells, exploiting location and environment information. Research on strategies for the management and relaying in mobile terminals clusters, exploiting geolocation information have also been ongoing, targeting to improve reliability, connectivity and security of cooperative cluster operation.

Prospective authors are invited to submit original and unpublished work on research topics including, but not limited to, the following, exploiting geolocation information:

• Fixed relays for cellular systems.
• Relaying techniques.
• Resource allocation in relaying and handover.
• Transmit power reduction.
• Intercellular interference management.
• Multi-hop relaying.
• Multi-cell processing.
• Femtocell based communications.
• Inter-cell interference cancellation.
• Femtocells time synchronization.
• RAN coverage and capacity optimization.
• Cooperation among mobile terminals.
• Realization and usage of cooperative clusters.
• Distributed STBC.
• Security in cooperative clusters.

Intended audience: Academic and industrial researchers in wireless communications.

 

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Important Dates
Paper submission:	June 8th, 2012	FINAL!
Notification of acceptance:	June 30th, 2012
Submission of camera-ready papers:	July 15th, 2012

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Special Organizing Commitee

Prof. Dirk Slock

Dirk Slock received an engineering degree from the University of Gent, Belgium in 1982, and the MS in EE, MS in Statistics, and PhD in EE in 1986, 1989 and 1989 from Stanford University (with a Fulbright scholarship). While at Stanford, he developed new fast recursive least-squares (RLS) algorithms for adaptive filtering. In 1989-91, he was a member of the research staff at the Philips Research Laboratory Belgium. In 1991, he joined the Eurecom Institute where he is now professor. At EURECOM, he teaches statistical signal processing and signal processing techniques for wireless and wireline communications. He has also been active as a consultant on xDSL, DVB-T and 3G systems. He is the author of over 250 technical papers, and is a Fellow of the IEEE.

Joaquim Bastos

Joaquim Bastos received his Bachelors and MSc degree in Electronics and Telecommunications Engineering from the University of Aveiro, Portugal, in 1997 and 2006 respectively. Since 2003, he became a senior researcher at the Instituto de Telecomunicações, Aveiro, and participated in several international research projects, such as MATRICE, 4MORE, ORACLE, and WHERE. He is author of several conference publications, and his main research interests include: digital signal processing for OFDM and MC-CDMA, multi-user detection, cognitive radio systems, and optimized geolocation-based communications.