A statistical radio coverage prediction approach for cooperative control in relay based cellular networks

To achieve geographic load balancing for spectrum efficiency and respond to the environment changes, cooperative control has shown that the system performance can be improved with global optimization among different cells in the system level simulations. When a cooperative control scheme is applied in the physical network, coverage holes are concern of the network operators. In this paper, the radio coverage issue is analyzed for the potential risks of the cooperative control when applied in realistic environment. A statistical model is proposed for radio coverage prediction, where the cooperative control feature is used for the precision of prediction model improvement. The prediction model is verified with theoretical and simulated radio coverage comparisons and survey data for prediction accuracy is also discussed.