A Flexible and Cost-Effective Heterogeneous Network Deployment Scheme for Beyond 4G

The network capacity has to be maximized to support the ever-increasing data traffic demand. One of the potential outcomes to enhance the network capacity is to enhance the spectral efficiency per unit area by expanding the serving node densities. This is unreasonable on account of present Macro evolved node B (eNB) for which site acquisition is expensive. The idea of heterogeneous network (HetNet) and multi-hop relay (MHR) are extremely prominent in long-term evolution (LTE) standard, where small cells are deployed along with Macro cell. Small cells are more suitable solution for the coverage and traffic issues experienced by Macro cell users. Unfortunately, HetNet deployment is not specified in any of the standards. The network operators have been managing tremendous investments for cellular infrastructures. Because of the high cost and lack of radio resources, a precise and productive HetNet deployment seems uttermost important. In this work, a flexible four-stage fuzzy logic-based HetNet deployment scheme is proposed, which deploys mix of Macro-eNB, Micro-eNB and relay station (RS) by considering capacity, coverage and cost factors. The proposed scheme identifies the required number of eNBs, their types and deployment locations to offer the expected coverage in a cost-effective way. The simulation results demonstrate that our proposed scheme is more flexible and offers improved performance in terms of system cost and power ratio than the conventional HetNet deployment schemes.