Adaptive coverage control using cell-specific beamforming based on throughput prediction

As the number of small cells is increased to improve mobile network capacity, disparity in the traffic load between small cells will unexpectedly widen, and then user throughput in a small cell with high traffic load will decrease. We propose a novel coverage control method that adaptively controls cell coverage for areas where users are densely located by using cell-specific beamforming with multiple array antenna elements on a small cell base station on the basis of user throughput prediction. With our proposed method, since the received signal quality of the densely located users is improved and other users are offloaded to neighboring cells, it is possible to improve user throughput in the small cell with high traffic load. The results of the performance evaluation show that the proposed method can improve the worst 5% of the user throughput by 68% due to load balancing and received signal quality improvement.