Design of a Computationally Efficient Dynamic System‐Level Simulator for Enterprise LTE Femtocell Scenarios

The sleeping cell problem is one of the most critical issues for cellular deployments, consisting in the outage of a cellular station, which, conversely, works properly from the point of view of the monitoring system. This problem is often not detectable by the operators, and it could lead to severe degradations in the service provision in the long term. This issue has been commonly managed by the centralized analysis of network performance indicators. However, those solutions are unsuitable for the new ultra-dense small cell scenarios that will characterize 5G deployments. New approaches are required to cope with the high level of cell overlapping as well as the huge number of sites to be managed. In this context, a novel mechanism to detect sleeping cell issues is proposed, which takes advantage of the recent advances in indoor localization as well as monitoring data obtained by user equipments. In addition, a root cause analysis of the cell failure is presented. The capabilities of the proposed approach are evaluated in a realistic key scenario, showing the feasibility and usefulness of the proposed location-based approach.

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Location-based distributed sleeping cell detection and root cause analysis for 5G ultra-dense networks

Fortes

Barco

Aguilar-Garcı́a

2016

“…Firstly, the implementation of the proposed mechanism and its assessment is accomplished in a dynamic LTE system-level simulator [30]. For this paper, a single trisectorized macrocell (blue triangle) has been deployed into a large scenario of 3 km long and 2.6 km wide where Málaga Airport has been designed and located 500 m far from the macrocell as a realistic simulated indoor environment.…”

Section: Analysis Set-upmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Further details about the simulator configuration are summarized in Table 1, while a full description is detailed in [30].…”

Section: Analysis Set-upmentioning

confidence: 99%

Improving load balancing techniques by location awareness at indoor femtocell networks

Aguilar-Garcı́a

Fortes

Garrido³

et al. 2016

Self Cite

Femtocells are the auspicious solution for the coverage and capacity challenges that mobile operators are currently facing indoors. Whereas some operators are focused on offloading data traffic from macrocells to femtocells, others prefer to ensure indoor coverage and prioritize voice traffic in order to mitigate the negative impact of blocked or dropped calls. In this context, this paper proposes a novel self-optimizing mechanism to prevent congestion problems at indoor environments, focused on operators that prioritize voice traffic connections. A challenge specific to femtocells is that they normally can only serve a small number of simultaneous connections. Based on this restriction, the proposed mechanism resizes femtocell coverage areas by tuning their transmission powers for load balancing purposes. How information on user location can enhance the optimization process is also investigated in this paper. According to this, two methods to estimate the received signal level per user are evaluated. Finally, the performance is studied by means of both simulations and a real field trial.

“…The heterogeneous network scenario described in Section 3 has been included in a dynamic LTE systemlevel simulator [40]. Table 3 shows the main simulation features and parameters.…”

Section: Simulation Setupmentioning

confidence: 99%

A femtocell location strategy for improving adaptive traffic sharing in heterogeneous LTE networks

Avilés

Toril

Luna-Ramírez

2015

Femtocells have been suggested as a promising solution for the provision of indoor coverage and capacity. In this paper, a new planning strategy for placing femtocell access points so as to make the most of automatic traffic sharing algorithms is proposed for a long-term evolution (LTE) heterogeneous network. The aim of the proposed method is to increase overlapping between femtocells by increasing the percentage of area with low dominance of the serving femtocell. Method assessment is carried out by simulating classical traffic sharing algorithms in a three-dimensional office scenario with femtocell location plans designed based on different network performance criteria. Results show that location plans with a larger low dominance ratio achieve better network performance after sharing traffic than plans designed for maximum coverage or connection quality.