Pico Cell Densification Study in LTE Heterogeneous Networks

Heterogeneous Network (HetNet) deployment has been considered as the main approach to boost capacity and coverage in Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks in order to fulfill the huge future demand on mo-bile broadband usage. In order to study the improvement on network performance, i.e. capacity, coverage and user throughput, from pico cell densification in LTE HetNets, a network densification algorithm which determines the placement locations of the pico sites based on pathloss has been designed and applied to build several network models with different pico cell densities. The study has been taken based on a real radio network in a limited urban area using an advanced Matlab-based radio network simulator. The simulation results show that the network performance generally is enhanced by introducing more pico cells to the network.