IOFC 2012 - Fourth International Workshop on Indoor and Outdoor Femto Cells

Femto cells have been a hot and controversially discussed topic in the last years. While some players in the communications industry claim that they will never be able to compete against existing wireless local area network standards such as WLAN, others see them as a potential game-changer in communications, with a much higher potential than just superseding an existing standard. Fact is that femto cells are currently the only option to perform a seamless voice hand-over from a macro cellular connectivity to a local area cell. Further, indoor and outdoor femto cells offer mobile network operators the opportunity to offload big portions of their mobile traffic to comparatively inexpensive backhaul, and to sell to their customers comprehensive fixed-line and mobile connectivity solutions, which may ultimately lead to a strong change in the value chain of communications.
Fact is also that indoor and outdoor femto cells inherit a manifold of technical challenges. As such cells are typically user-deployed, interference dependencies are out of the control of operators, and hence sophisticated and adaptive resource management and interference mitigation solutions are needed. Further, seamless and efficient roaming between very densely and three-dimensionally deployed access points will yet requires years of research to come.
This workshop shall provide a platform for discussion on the newest technologies and trends connected to indoor and outdoor femto cells. The workshop chairs solicit both technical and also business-related publications on the topic. The workshop will consist of keynote speeches, presentations, and discussions. We invite both academic and industrial researchers to identify and discuss technical challenges and disseminate recent results related to femtocell networks.
Topics
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:
Interference analysis, avoidance, and mitigation.
Cooperative operation of femtocells.
Resource allocation techniques.
Power control and power saving mechanisms.
Synchronization issues for femtocells.
Cognitive radio techniques.
Game theoretical & auctioning techniques for femtocells.
Co-existence between femto- and macro-cells.
Self-configuration, -optimization, and ?healing mechanisms for macro+femto networks.
Economics of femtocells.
Mobility management, smart signalling and handoffs.
Femtocell deployment scenarios.