Spectral-, energy-, & cost-efficient deployment of small cells in a HetNet topology

In heterogeneous networks (HetNets), small cells are overlaid within a large cell in order to increase capacity and coverage beyond the initial deployment of a large cell. Previous studies assumed that small cells are deployed only in the cell edge area of a large cell to support low-SINR users in that area. However, in a future communication environment, we need more small-cells to support much higher user data rates. We propose a spectral-, energy-, and cost-efficient small cell deployment scheme for maximizing the following spectrum, energy, and cost related metrics: spectral efficiency, spectral and energy efficiency, and deployment cost efficiency. We find the optimal values of these metrics for varying the number of small cells and the transmit power of small cells.