Abstract
An exponential growth in data demand on wireless networks and wireless link capacity approaching its theoretical limits, bound us to find new solutions and innovative network designs to handle the enormous amount of traffic. In this paper, we discuss long term evolution-advance (LTE-A) heterogeneous networks (HetNets) being a most effective solution to break this wireless cellular capacity crunch. LTE-A HetNets provide adequate increase in capacity by utilizing multi-tier architecture consisting of different type of cells i.e macro cell, small cell, relay and device to device. However this increase in capacity comes with certain challenges in HetNets outlined in this article. Considering inter cell interference coordination (ICIC) as biggest challenge in LTE-A HetNets, this article surveys state of the art LTE-A HetNets deployments with focus on ICIC. Effective ICIC techniques allow further substantial capacity increase. We give state of the art ICIC on air-interface as well as backhaul strategies for effective ICIC in LTE-A HetNets. Operators perspective of LTE-A HetNets with some insight to future of 5G LTE-A HetNets is provided. We also provide simulation results to show how LTE-A HetNets lead to realize ambitious targets of 5G technology in terms of capacity.