Capturing Spatial Randomness of Heterogeneous Cellular/WLAN Deployments With Dynamic Traffic

IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications. 2014. Vol. 32. No. 6. P. 1083–1099.

Galinina O., Andreev S., Gerasimenko M., Koucheryavy E., Himayat N., Yeh S. -., Talwar S.

As fourth generation communications technology is

already being deployed, research efforts are now being shifted to

what comes beyond state-of-the-art wireless systems. Driven by the

anticipated acceleration in mobile traffic demand, the wireless industry

is specifically focused on improving capacity and coverage

of current networks through aggressive reuse of the cellular spectrum.

Together with deploying an increasingly dense overlay tier

of smaller cells, mobile network operators are beginning to rely on

unlicensed-band WLAN technologies to leverage additional spectrum

and relieve congestion on their networks. Consequently, the

emerging vision of heterogeneous networks exploits the potential

of a diverse range of devices requiring connectivity at different

scales to augment available system capacity and improve the user

connectivity experience. In this paper, we seek to meet this important

trend with our novel integrated methodology for assisted

(managed) radio network selection capturing spatial randomness

of converged cellular/WLAN deployments together with dynamic

uplink traffic fromtheir users. To this end, we employ tools coming

from stochastic geometry to characterize performance of macro

and pico cellular networks, as well as WLAN, mindful of user

experience and targeting intelligent network selection/assignment.

We complement our analysis with system-level simulations providing

deeper insights into the behavior of future heterogeneous

deployments.

Keywords: wireless networks, cellular systems