Personal Picocell Scheme Using Adaptive Control CRE in Heterogeneous Mobile Networks

Heterogeneous networks (HetNets), which are combined with a macrocell and picocell in the same coverage, are expected to further increase the system capacity in fifth-generation mobile systems and beyond. In HetNets, the cell range expansion (CRE) technique plays an important role and can allow more user equipment (UE) to access the picocell, i.e., virtually expand the picocell coverage. However, conventional CRE techniques that provide a fixed cell selection offset (CSO) for all UE may worsen user throughput if UE is forced to connect to the picocell because the received signal-to-interference plus noise ratio of the UE becomes lower. Therefore, we propose a personal picocell scheme using an adaptive control CRE technique to improve user throughput in which different CSOs are assigned to UE to form each optimal picocell for each UE. In this paper, we first describe the aspects and algorithm of the proposed scheme. Then, we show the user throughput for adaptive control CRE in comparison with conventional CRE by using system-level computer simulations for the two types of HetNets, i.e., single-band and multi-band HetNets. In the simulations, we first clarify the optimal parameters of the adaptive control CRE. We then show the average and 5-percentile user throughput of the optimized adaptive control CRE in comparison with that of conventional CRE. From these results, we confirmed that the personal picocell scheme using the adaptive control CRE can improve the 5-percentile user throughput while maintaining the average user throughput compared with that of conventional CRE.