Abstract
In recent years, heterogeneous cellular network (HetNet) topology has been attracting much attention. HetNet, which is a network topology with low power base stations installed inside the cell range of conventional macrocells, can realize network capacity enhancement through the effects of macrocell offloading and cell shrinkage. Due to the heterogeneity nature of HetNet, network designers should carefully consider about the interference management, resource allocation, user association and cell range expansion. These issues have been well studied in recent literatures. However, one of the important problems which has not been well investigated in conventional works is the base station (BS) deployment problem in HetNet. This paper investigates the optimal pico base station deployment in heterogeneous cellular networks especially with the existence of hotspots. In this paper, pico BS locations are optimized together with other network parameters including spectrum splitting ratio and signal-to-interference-noise ratio (SINR) bias for cell range expansion to maximize the total system rate, by considering two spectrum allocation strategies, i.e. spectrum overlapping and spectrum splitting. Numerical results show that the optimized pico BS locations can improve the system rate, the average user rate and outage user rate in HetNet with hotspots.