A Brief Survey on Placement of Access Points in Ultra-Dense Heterogeneous 5G Networks

Abstract

Ultra-dense heterogeneous networks involving LTE, Wi-Fi, and D2D communications appear to be the dominant technologies for many more years to come for achieving the distinct capabilities that 5G or higher generation networks are expected to provide. LTE and Wi-Fi devices follow different protocols in grabbing the communication channel. Because of this heterogeneity and also the proximity of various types of devices due to ultra densification, there will be increased channel interferences among the communicating devices which often degrade the overall performance of the network. Judicious placement of the access points (APs) or base stations (BSs) to cover a given geographical region in such an ultra-dense network taking the transmitting powers and interfering distances into account constitutes an important research problem of current interest. We present here a brief survey on the various techniques for the placement of APs or BSs under such a scenario of ultra-dense heterogeneous networks.