Unlocking wireless performance with co-operation in co-located base station pools

Multi-cell base station co-operation techniques, ranging from load-balancing, joint resource-allocation to macro-diversity schemes, have been known to improve wireless system performance significantly by exploiting the higher degrees of freedom to make more optimized decisions. However, the realization of these techniques has remained limited largely due to constraints on inter-BS communication and the latencies involved in information exchange for distributed base stations. Base station pooling is an interesting alternative network architecture where all the BS computational resources (enabled by software radio) are pooled in a central location and connected via fiber to simple radio-front ends mounted on remote cell-towers. In this paper, we study the potential of base station co-operation in a pooled base station model, and present some of its advantages with a focus on interference, macro-diversity and mobility management.