Analysis of heterogeneous cellular network with hexagonal tessellated macrocells and randomly positioned small cells

Abstract

An analytical approach is developed to evaluate the performance of a hybrid base station (BS) location model which considers the location regularity of macro BSs and topological randomness of small BSs, where the coverage probability and spectral efficiency are derived and verified by simulation. When both tiers have the same BS intensity, the tier of tessellated macro BSs achieves a 50% advantage in spectral efficiency and the tier of underlaid randomly positioned small BSs exhibits a 30% improvement, over that of a 2-tier pure random model where both tiers are modeled by Poisson point processes. With the increasing small BSs to macro BS intensity, the spectral efficiency gain of the hybrid model over that of the pure random model decreases and even becomes marginal, thus providing a design guideline on the small BSs to macro BS intensity ratio to achieve a desired coverage probability and spectral efficiency in HCNs.