Heterogeneous Cellular Networks with Flexible Cell Association: A Comprehensive Downlink SINR Analysis

By Han-Shin Jo, Y. Sang, Ping Xia, Jeffrey G. Andrews. IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, 2011

1,084 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this paper we develop a tractable framework for SINR analysis in downlink heterogeneous cellular networks (HCNs) with flexible cell association policies. The HCN is modeled as a multi-tier cellular network where each tier's base stations (BSs) are randomly located and have a particular transmit power, path loss exponent, spatial density, and bias towards admitting mobile users. For example, as compared to macrocells, picocells would usually have lower transmit power, higher path loss exponent (lower antennas), higher spatial density (many picocells per macrocell), and a positive bias so that macrocell users are actively encouraged to use the more lightly loaded picocells. In the present paper we implicitly assume all base stations have full queues; future work should relax this. For this model, we derive the outage probability of a typical user in the whole network or a certain tier, which is equivalently the downlink SINR cumulative distribution function. The results are accurate for all SINRs, and their expressions admit quite simple closed-forms in some plausible special cases. We also derive the average ergodic rate of the typical user, and the minimum average user throughput - the smallest value among the average user throughputs supported by one cell in each tier. We observe that neither the number of BSs or tiers changes the outage probability or average ergodic rate in an interference-limited full-loaded HCN with unbiased cell association (no biasing), and observe how biasing alters the various metrics.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/77d271d88480bf9027caba56fa30c4a733e7d4fe

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Citations in the corpus

Joint Resource Partitioning and Offloading in Heterogeneous Cellular Networks (2013, methodology): “Similar tractable frameworks were used for deriving SINR distribution in HCNs in [19]–[21].”
Offloading in Heterogeneous Networks: Modeling, Analysis, and Design Insights (2012, background): “Lemma 5 reduces to the earlier derived SINR coverage expressions in [24] for M = K = 1 (single tier, single RAT) and those in [22] for M = 1 (single RAT, multiple tiers).”
Millimeter Wave Cellular Networks: A MAC Layer Perspective (2015, background): “Most of the current standards define a cell by the set of UEs that are associated using a minimum-distance rule, which leads to non-overlapping Voronoi tessellation of the serving area of every BS, exemplified by the well-known hexagonal cells [41], [42].”
Energy-Efficient Design of MIMO Heterogeneous Networks With Wireless Backhaul (2015, methodology): “(37) Under the association rule defined in Section II and by follow ing a similar approach as the one in [53], the distribution of each of the distances rc,j is equal to the distribution of rm, given by frm(r) = 2πτmλmr Am exp ( −Gmπr(2) ) , r ≥ 0 (38) with Gm = τmλm + τsλs ( Pst Pmt ) 2 α .”
A Primer on Cellular Network Analysis Using Stochastic Geometry (2016, methodology): “Under the average power based cell association, the downlink and uplink analyses presented in Sections III and IV, respectively, can both be extended to downlink [24] and uplink [4] HCNs without the need for using any additional tools.”
Modeling heterogeneous network interference (2012, neutral): “In [25] the user is attached to the BS providing the strongest average received signal, whereas in [22], [26], user association based on maximum SINR connectivity is considered.”
Stochastic Geometry for Modeling, Analysis, and Design of Multi-Tier and Cognitive Cellular Wireless Networks: A Survey (2013, methodology): “In [59], [60], the authors investigated the above issue and introduced a parameter called the biasing factor to control the network load of each network tier.”
Analysis on Cache-Enabled Wireless Heterogeneous Networks (2015, methodology): “The authors in [27] model the node locations of the multi-tier HetNet as mutually independent PPPs, and analyze the system performance in terms of the average rate.”
User Association for Load Balancing in Heterogeneous Cellular Networks (2012, methodology): “There are some recent studies on the SINR bias [25, 32], but have not given any theoretical guidance on the “best” biasing factors in the sense of load balancing and/or achieving some optimization criteria.”
Modeling and Analysis of K-Tier Downlink Heterogeneous Cellular Networks (2011, background): “An initial characterization of biased cell association policies can be found in [40].”