Small cells placement scheme in metropolitan area environment

The low power radio access nodes, also known as small cells, are always applied to compensate the coverage of macro cells so as to increase the network capacity. The radio spectrum condition is greatly affected by the buildings and there will be many communication dead zones in the metropolitan area environment if only macro cells are deployed. Generally, the communication dead zone is always small and in irregular shape, therefore, the deployment of small cells is one of the most convincible ways to deal with it. However, the interference, necessary overlapping for handoff, coverage improvement, and cost are correlated to one another. And it is hard to determine the number and locations of small cells to be deployed. In this paper, we propose the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) based small cell placement algorithm to effectively deploy the small cells in the communication dead zone of metropolitan area. The fitness value in the PSO process of the proposed scheme is tuned by the adaption function to compromise the coverage maximization and necessary overlapping of small cells. A practical area of Taipei City was adopted as an experimental example to investigate the performance of the proposed scheme. The experimental results illustrate that the proposed scheme places small cells in proper locations so that the coverage can be effectively improved.