Locating small cells using geo-located UE measurement reports & RF fingerprinting

This paper proposes a number of methods to determine potential small cell site locations using geo-located UE measurement reports in order to maximise the traffic offload from the macrocell network onto the small cells. The paper also shows how the information contained within the measurement reports can be used to create “RF fingerprints#x201D; which in turn can be used to discard UE measurement reports with erroneous location information and by doing so increase the effectiveness of the small cell placement algorithm. Simulations are presented which suggest that when addressing traffic hotspots in central London using small cells with coverage radii of 50m and 100m, the gains provided by the placement algorithms using simple RF fingerprinting technique are significant for UE reports with large location errors (>100m RMS error) when compared to techniques not using RF fingerprinting.