Abstract-Femtocells, despite their name, pose a potentially large disruption to the carefully planned cellular networks that now connect a majority of the planet's citizens to the Internet and with each other. Femtocells -which by the end of 2010 already outnumbered traditional base stations and at the time of publication are being deployed at a rate of about five million a year -both enhance and interfere with this network in ways that are not yet well understood. Will femtocells be crucial for offloading data and video from the creaking traditional network? Or will femtocells prove more trouble than they are worth, undermining decades of careful base station deployment with unpredictable interference while delivering only limited gains? Or possibly neither: are femtocells just a "flash in the pan"; an exciting but short-lived stage of network evolution that will be rendered obsolete by improved WiFi offloading, new backhaul regulations and/or pricing, or other unforeseen technological developments? This tutorial article overviews the history of femtocells, demystifies their key aspects, and provides a preview of the next few years, which the authors believe will see a rapid acceleration towards small cell technology. In the course of the article, we also position and introduce the articles that headline this special issue.

Abstract. A code-division multiple-access system with channel coding may be viewed as a serially-concatenated coded system. In this paper we propose a low complexity method for decoding the resulting inner code (due to the spreading sequence), which allows iterative (turbo) decoding of the serially-concatenated code pair. The per-bit complexity of the proposed decoder increases only linearly with the number of users. Performance within a fraction of a dB of the single user bound for heavily loaded asynchronous CDMA is shown both by simulation and analytically.

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This paper studies the information-theoretic secrecy performance in large-scale cellular networks based on a stochastic geometry framework. The locations of both base stations and mobile users are modeled as independent two-dimensional Poisson point processes. We consider two important features of cellular networks, namely, information exchange between base stations and cell association, to characterize their impact on the achievable secrecy rate of an arbitrary downlink transmission with a certain portion of the mobile users acting as potential eavesdroppers. In particular, tractable results are presented under diverse assumptions on the availability of eavesdroppers' location information at the serving base station, which captures the benefit from the exchange of the location information between base stations.

Abstract-Small cell network (SCN) offers, for the first time, a low-cost and scalable mechanism to meet the forecast data-traffic demand. In this paper, we propose a non-uniform SCN deployment scheme. The small cell base stations (BSs) in this scheme will not be utilized in the region within a prescribed distance away from any macrocell BSs, defined as the inner region. Based upon the analytical framework provided in this work, the downlink coverage and single user throughput are precisely characterized. Provided that the inner region size is appropriately chosen, we find that the proposed non-uniform SCN deployment scheme can maintain the same level of cellular coverage performance even with 50% less small cell BSs used than the uniform SCN deployment, which is commonly considered in the literature. Furthermore, both the coverage and the single user throughput performance will significantly benefit from the proposed scheme, if its average small cell density is kept identical to the uniform SCN deployment. This work demonstrates the benefits obtained from a simple non-uniform SCN deployment, thus highlighting the importance of deploying small cells selectively.