Small‐cell planning in LTE HetNet to improve energy efficiency

Abstract

Cell planning is one essential operation in wireless networks, and it significantly affects system performance and cost. Many research efforts consider the cell planning problem with identical base stations (BSs) or to construct a new network on the region without any infrastructure. However, long-term evolution (LTE) adopts heterogeneous network, which allows operators to tactically deploy small cells to enhance signal coverage and improve performance. It thus motivates us to propose a small-cell planning problem by adaptively adding low-powered BSs with the limitation of budget to an existing network to increase its energy efficiency, which is defined by the ratio of network throughput to the amount of energy consumption of BSs. We consider 2 types of LTE small cells, namely, microcells and picocells, and develop different clustering strategies to deploy these cells. Based on the available resource and traffic demand in each cell, we then adjust the transmitted power of the deployed BS with energy concern. Experimental results demonstrate that our small-cell planning solution can achieve high-energy efficiency of LTE networks, which means that BSs can better use their transmitted energy to satisfy the traffic demands of user devices. This paper contributes in proposing a practical problem for cell planning with heterogeneous network consideration and developing an efficient solution to provide green communications. KEYWORDScell planning, energy efficiency, heterogeneous network (HetNet), long-term evolution (LTE), small cell Int J Commun Syst. 2018;31:e3492. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/dac Macrocell 43 to 52 (usually 46) at least 1000 operator installed Microcell 33 to 43 250 to 1000 operator installed Picocell 24 to 33 100 to 300 operator installed Femtocell less than 23 less than 50 user installedWith the coming of 4G epoch, users are thirsty for broadband wireless communications and operators have to make sure that their deployed networks can support various services with high traffic demands such as mobile television, online gaming, and teleconferences. 7 In fact, Cisco points out in its report 8 that multimedia streaming and video downloads have occupied a large portion of the global network bandwidth today and will keep growing to over 80% of all consumer Internet traffics in 2020. Inevitably, the cell planning solutions in 2G/3G networks according to homogeneous BSs will become inefficient, especially when many users congregate in small hotspots (for example, markets or airports) and ask for large-demand data transmissions. 9 Consequently, long-term evolution (LTE) uses the concept of heterogeneous network (HetNet) to allow diverse BSs to cooperate in the same network. In particular, LTE defines 4 types of BSs 10 called macrocell, micorcell, picocell, and femtocell BSs, whose comparison is given in Table 1. Generally speaking, operators adopt macrocell BSs to be the network's backbone to provide a wide range of service coverage and also support those user devices with high mobility by reducing their f...

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