Density-Aware Cellular Coverage Control: Interference-Based Density Estimation

Abstract

As demand for mobile communications increases, cells have to become smaller to efficiently use the scarce spectrum and to increase capacity, and small-cell networks will hereby emerge. They may be large in scale and highly dynamic resembling ad hoc networks due to the moving base stations. The variations in the density of the small cell networks impact the quality of service and introduce many novel challenges such as coverage control. We propose two novel base station density estimators, the interference-based density estimator (IDE) and the multi-access edge cloud-based density estimator (CDE) in a three-dimensional field. The estimators employ received signal strength measurements. We validate these two density estimators by using Monte-Carlo simulations. Furthermore, we analyze the impact of density on network outage in cellular networks and propose a density-aware cell zooming technique. According to the observations, base station (BS) density affects network coverage significantly. Received signal strength (RSS)-based density estimators can easily be implemented and applied in the network communication stack although they are more prone to shadowing and fading. Under favour of the density-aware cell zooming method, the network outage can be managed dynamically by adapting the transmit power, which provides a self-configurable and -organized network. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.