Energy and spectral efficient microcell deployment in heterogeneous cellular networks

Abstract

With the ubiquitous data-rate demand in cellular networks, total power consumption is growing rapidly. Thus, it is essential to design the future networks with energy and spectral efficient strategies. Using heterogeneous networks (HetNets) is one possible way of improving spectral and energy efficiencies in cellular networks. In this paper, under coverage ratio and area spectral efficiency constraints, we consider deploying strategies with low power small cells in order to improve the spectral and energy efficiencies of the conventional macrocell only cellular network. To compare the efficiencies of different scenarios, we employ area spectral efficiency and power consumption per bit criterion. As a result, we observe that deploying microcells increases both energy and spectral efficiencies.