Energy and Spectral Efficient Microcell Deployment in Heterogeneous Cellular Networks

Due to growing power consumption and data-rate demand in cellular networks, it is crucial to design the future networks with energy and spectral efficient strategies. Using heterogeneous networks (HetNets) is one possible way of improving energy and spectral efficiency in cellular networks. In this paper, under a coverage constraint, we consider deploying strategies of low power microcells in order to improve the energy and area spectral efficiencies of the conventional macrocell only cellular network. We start our analysis with accurate power consumption models for both macro and micro base stations. Then, we analyze the energy and area spectral efficiencies with respect to the number and size of microcells. We observe that deploying microcells while keeping the coverage area the same increases both energy and spectral efficiencies. We also observe that microcell deployment strategy depends on the inter-site distance (ISD). Finally, we conclude that it is possible to choose a range of ISD that maximizes the energy efficiency while providing the required traffic demand.