Radio resource management in coordinated antenna system deployments

Distributed Antenna Systems (DAS), wherein multiple antennas are distributed across the cell with the antennas being connected to the base station via a wired connector have been proposed as a means to improve coverage and capacity of traditional cellular systems. In this paper, we introduce the concept of Coordinated Antenna System (CAS), a variant of the DAS system wherein the antennas are context aware. A CAS deployment can be visualised as a controller unit and several remote antenna units (RUs) distributed in a physical premises such as an office, a shopping mall etc. with the controller unit handling the resource management of the different RUs connected to it. Even though such an architecture looks promising from the perspective of improving coverage and capacity (through better frequency reuse), interference issues need to be carefully addressed. This paper proposes a resource management mechanism for CAS (called CRRM) and highlights findings from its performance evaluation. CRRM is simple from an implementation perspective, adaptive to changes in the underlying radio environment and helps to avoid/minimise interference as indicated by the findings from the performance evaluation.