Energy-Efficient Repulsive Cell Activation for Heterogeneous Cellular Networks

In this paper, we consider a two-tier heterogeneous cellular network (HCN) where macrocells and distributed low power cells, namely daughtercells, are operated in a common spectrum. Due to the ad-hoc nature of daughtercell BS deployments such as pico and femto cells, the mutual interference varies and obviously the coverage probability behaves differently in terms of transmit powers and densities of macrocells and daughtercells. In this paper, we employ repulsive cell activation in the interfering daughtercell network and see the impact of a minimum separation distance between the daughtercell BSs in terms of coverage under open access and power efficiency. The control of the minimum separation distance plays a role in balancing cell load effectively according to changing user density and is justified for the coexistence of low power daughtercells. The optimal minimum separation distance in terms of user density and target per-tier user throughput requirements is found by a numerical search based on a simple bisection method. Numerical results show the benefit of cell repulsion in terms of increased user density support and less area power consumption.