Small Cells Placement for Crowd Networks

International audienceThe deployment of small cells is one of the technical solutions to meet the challenge of data traffic rise. It reduces the cost of radio access networks. The efficiency of this solution depends on the success of cell planning to mitigate the interference. This work aims to optimize the incremental cell planning scheme that considers a preliminary macro-cell network infrastructure and expands it with new small cells to enhance the coverage and the capacity. In order to reduce the cost of installing new small cells, we consider a crowd networking business model where the Mobile Network Operator retrieves sites to deploy small cells above. We formulate the small cells placement problem as an Integer Linear Programming. It aims to maximize the coverage, ensure the required capacity and mitigate the cross-tier interference. Since the problem is NP-hard with large number of sites, we propose an heuristic to select the optimal sites locations around each macro cell. We tested the proposed heuristic with different simulation scenarios. The proposed Sequential Deployment scenario is better in coverage uniformity among dense and non dense zones whilst the Dense Zones First ensures more optimized selected sites number with better capacity in the dense zones in terms of users. The last scenario proves that higher candidate sites optimize the number of small cells in the non dense areas without compromising the coverage