Performance of Macro-Pico Heterogeneous Networks based on LTE-Advanced

Heterogeneous Network (HetNet) has been extensively discussed as a solution to increase the capacity of Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) systems, which coexist of high power macro base stations (BS) and Low Power Nodes (LPNs) such as pico, femto and relay nodes. This paper focuses on the co-channel deployment of macro and pico cells, in which high spectrum reuse and co-channel interference coexist. The techniques of Cell Range Expansion (CRE) and enhanced Inter-Cell Interference Coordination (eICIC) are applied to offload traffic and mitigate serious interference, respectively. In order to fully evaluate the impact of the deployment options to the system performance, extensive system level simulation is carried out in our investigation, which is based on the 3GPP standard. The results show that huge performance gain or tradeoff between the system throughput and the spectrum efficiency can be achieved if the value of deployment option is well designed. Finally, some suggestions are provided on the configuration of the deployment parameters.