Sustainable Cellular Coverage using Self

Organizing Networks in Small Cells Deployment


Siva Priya Thiagarajah, Nurzuhaireen Binti Mohd Zaki, ^Subhashini Gopal Krishnan

*
Faculty of Engineering, Multimedia University, Cyberjaya, Malaysia.
^
School of Engineering, Asia Pacific University of Technology & Information, Technology Park,Bukit Jalil, Malaysia

Abstract- Self Organizing Networks are seen as a way
forward to increasing the effectiveness of power management
in beyond 4G wireless communications. The implementation
of SON improves capacity, coverage and power management
in a cellular system. This paper investigates how the self-
healing and self-optimization property of SON can be used in
deploying Small Cells in an outdoor urban environment. The
findings suggest that the use of planned small cell deployment
which have SON capabilities can provide coverage
sustainability by 90% and is able to maintain user data rate
when an outage of any SC node in the cellular system occurs.
Findings also show that the proposed scheme in power
adjustment of the SON is energy efficient.
Keywords – Self Organizing Networks, Small Cell
Deployment, Power Efficiency
I. INTRODUCTION
A. Small Cell Network
The deployment of small cell network is one of the key
features in the evolution of the fifth generation (5G)
telecommunication system. Small Cells (SC) are deployed by
“splitting” a Macro Base Station(MBS) cell into a number of
smaller cell size radiuses and then placing the cell closer to each
other to result in a densely packed network of smaller cells. SCs
are low cost, low power and have the self-organizing properties
which can help to mitigate the capacity and coverage problems
that can arise when a peer SC in the cellular system fails. SCs
in outdoor deployment can be solar powered, thus allowing for
increased capacity at the same power requirements as when the
MBS was functioning on its own to provide the required
coverage in a cell. SCs can be integrated easily with the existing
MBS as they often use the same interfaces as the MBS. SCs are
“plug-and-play” and can be deployed at places like lamp post
and building sides, eliminating the need for additional tower
costs.
The deployment of SCs however faced challenges in terms of
spectrum utilization, inter-cell interference and the need for
prolonged connectivity between the SC and the core network
[1].
A high SC to MBS ratio in a given coverage area can lead to
inefficient and unfair spectrum utilization thus providing
limited capacity.
To reduce vertical handover challenges, the SCs are often
deployed in the same frequency band as the MBS. SCs
integrated with the macro cells will create not only inter-cell
interference between SC and MBS but also among the SCs
themselves.
High quality and dedicated connectivity between SCs and the
core network is costly to achieve as the existing backhaul
connections are already overloaded with existing connections.
Due to the low power transmission of the SCs, atmospheric
attenuation can also affect the intended coverage of the SCs,
making the covered area of the SC to be sometimes
unpredictable.
B. Self-organizing Network for SCN Deployment
Self-organizing refers to the process of autonomous
formation of connectivity, addressing, and routing structures
[2]. Self-organizing network (SON) is considered to be a
necessity to speed up planning, optimization, management and
healing of complex mobile communications networks. In other
words, SONs constitute a novel approach that empowers
operators to reduce the amount of manual intervention involved
in network planning. Picocells and femtocells mostly depend on
their self-organizing to reduce interference between themselves
since they are deployed without the supervision of the operator.
SON implementation in the deployment of SC has proven
to have a lot of advantages. SON performs three actions
autonomously that enables them to be independently deployed
with minimal configuration and maintenance [3].
In self-configuration phase, newly deployed cells configure
themselves upon “plug-and-play”. The self-configuring
property of SON reduces the installation time of the small cell
networks thus providing faster deployment of the network and
less cost is needed [4]. The self-configuration also reduces
human intervention in the installation part making the system is
less susceptible to human errors.
 In order to minimize interference, self-organizing small cells
are able to configure its radio parameter based on the network
environment through the self-configuring properties. In [5],
Femtocells Base Station (FBSs) in the system initialization
senses the spectrum environment to initialize the spectrum list.
These FBSs are responsible to allocate spectrum to its users and
then informing them the suitable uplink transmission. Each FBS
is equipped with two transceivers, one is sensing radio used for
sensing the spectrum, and the other one is cognitive radio which
is used for data communication. Whenever an FBS detects the
return of primary user, it will stop the transmission, and then it
will inform the femtocells and the neighbouring FBSs about the
primary users. Lastly the FBS will update the channel list and
run the spectrum sharing algorithm to select new channels and
allocates new time sub channel blocks for its femtocell users.
The algorithm proposed greatly reduces the co-channel
interference between the small cell and improves the channel
capacity while providing more channel opportunities to the
small cells. The work proposed in [6] uses a two-step game
theory approach to self-optimizing the network. During game
formulation, players are identified and the available actions are
set to determine the properties and performance of the game
theory models. The players then observe the interactions
between the multiusers, learn useful information from limited
feedback and adjust the behaviour towards the solution by using
a cognition functionality to self-configure for improve network
performance.
In the self-healing phase, cells self-detect if there are any
faults within a network and perform failure recovery. In the
self-optimization phase, the performance of the network is
constantly monitored to reduce interference and thus improving
the coverage and capacity. The monitoring is done by the SCs
themselves through feedback and long term channel estimation
techniques. SON helps to optimize overall bandwidth and
provide multiple near-real-time traffic rerouting solutions.
Implementation of energy-optimized traffic steering can also be
done using SON as the SON can intelligently switch off some
cells if the capacity is not needed. Better system performance
can be achieved through the implementation of SON as
frequency assignments are done in a self-organized way. This
will improve spectrum efficiency, ultimately leading to reduced
power consumption in the network. In [7] the algorithm
proposes initialization, interference prediction and finally the
suitable power determinations. The transmission power for
each power resource block is obtained by combining the lower
bound values, the upper bound values and the maximum
allowable transmission power, ultimately to obtain a self-
optimized minimum power transmission for the resource
blocks.
This work proposes a planned SC deployment to improve
coverage and capacity in a network. All users that are connected
to the MBS automatically choose the SC as the preferred
connection node. The MBS and SCs use the technology,
reducing the need for vertical handovers. The SCs self-heal by
optimizing power to provide coverage to the users who lose
connection to SCs those fail.
The paper is organised as follows; Section II will discuss the
methodology while Section III will describe the scenarios used
in the investigation. Finally, Section IV will discuss the results
from the power optimization method proposed in the model.
II. METHODOLOGY
The small cell network in this work covers a two kilometres
by two kilometres area. One MBS and four SCs are deployed
with 120 users randomly located in the coverage area. The
Okumura-Hata model is used to predict the path loss and the
environment considered is urban outdoor. This model is used is
recent works such as [6] for SON network modelling.
The Okumura-Hata path loss model can be expressed in the
following equation:
𝐿50 (𝑑𝐵) = 𝐿𝐹 + 𝐴𝑚𝑢 (𝑓, 𝑑) – 𝐺ℎ𝑡𝑒 – 𝐺ℎ𝑟𝑒 – 𝐺𝐴𝑅𝐸𝐴
(1)
where 𝐿50 is the median value of propagation path loss, 𝐿𝐹 –
free space propagation loss, 𝐺ℎ𝑡𝑒 is the BS antenna height gain
factor, 𝐺ℎ𝑟𝑒 is the mobile antenna height gain factor and 𝐺𝐴𝑅𝐸𝐴
is the gain due to the type of environment
The 𝐺ℎ𝑟𝑒 are:
𝐺ℎ𝑟𝑒 = 10 𝑙𝑜𝑔10(ℎ𝑟𝑒/3), ℎ𝑟𝑒 ≤ 3𝑚 (2)
The capacity of the system is calculated based on the
Shannon- Hartley theorem as follows using [6]:
𝐶 = 𝐵𝑙𝑜𝑔2 (1 +
𝑃𝑡 𝐺𝑡 −𝑃𝑎𝑡ℎ 𝐿𝑜𝑠𝑠−𝐴𝑛𝑡𝑒𝑛𝑛𝑎 𝐺𝑎𝑖𝑛
) (3)
𝐹𝐺𝑡 𝑘𝑇
where C is the capacity in bits per seconds, B the bandwidth in
MHz. 𝑃𝑡 the transmit power of the SCs, 𝐺𝑡 is the transmitter
antenna gain, F is the noise figure, k is the Boltzmann’s constant
and T is equivalent noise temperature in Kevin.
The advantage of the SON implementation is studied using
two scenarios, one scenario where SON is not implemented and
another with SON implemented for the SCs. The SCs in the
model are assumed to have self-configured upon the initial
“plug-and-play” when they were first deployed. This is shown
in Figure 1. All the users get MBS coverage, but users who can
also get the SC coverage will automatically be served by the
SC.
Without SON, when a peer SC node fails, coverage is lost by
the users as shown in Figure 2. However, with SON
implementation, the remaining active SCs in the model will
self-heal by increasing their transmit powers, thus increasing
their existing coverage area to cover the users who lose
connection due to a peer SC failing. After increasing power to
a preset value, the self-optimization capability of the SCs will
enable them to conduct a new search for closest users and
automatically configure a new user list for each remaining
active SC. The resulting coverage after self-healing is shown
in Figure 3. In a larger context, the cellular system itself is
considered to be self-healing because the coverage gaps will be
covered.

Figure 3: Coverage with 1 SC outage with SON after self-

healing

Table 1: Simulation parameters

Parameter Value
Carrier Frequency 2.6GHz
Figure 1: SC coverage of cellular network area
Channel Bandwidth 2.5MHz
Distance between MBS
0.1, 0.3 and 0.5km
and SC
Path Loss Model Okumura Model
Receiver (user) gain 1dB
No of SC 4
SC Height 200m
SC radius 0.5km
SC transmit power 44dBm
Transmitter (SC) gain 18dBi
User Height 1.5m
User Speed 3km/hr

Figure 2: Coverage with 1 SC outage without SON

III. DEPLOYMENT SCENARIOS AND
The simulation of the model is based on the simulation ALGORITHMS
parameters provided in Table 1.
The effectiveness of random and planned SC deployment
is first investigated. This simulation is done to investigate
which SC deployment is better in order to support the user
connections to the SCs. The coverage using random SCs
deployment and planned SCs deployment is shown is Figure 4
and Figure 5 respectively.
 Figure 4: User coverage of randomly distributed SC
Figure 5: User coverage of 500m planned SC
To perform the self-healing, two schemes are proposed in
this model as shown in Figure 6. The first scheme, SCHEME1,
requires only the two nearest SCs to the failed SC to increase
power and provide the loss coverage for the users who lose
connection when the SC fails. Only the two SCs adjusting the
power with update the user list during the self-organizing phase.
In the second power adjustment scheme, SCHEME2, all the
remaining SCs will increase power and all remaining SCs will
reset the user lists during the self-optimization phase. The
capacity sharing in this model is assumed to be fair-sharing.
Figure 6: SC Power Adjustment Schemes
IV. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
A. Planned SCN versus Random SCN
Figure 7: CDF plot for comparing planned SCBs versus
random SCBs
Figure 7 shows the difference between the data rate obtained
by the users when the SCs are either distributed randomly or in
planned fashion. Figure 7 shows that a planned deployment of
the SCs provides higher data rate to more than 60% of the users.
The SCs are deployed at 100m from MBS, 300m from MBS
and 500m from MBS. Figure 7 shows that the best distance to
deploy the SCs is at a distance of 100m from the MBS.
The planned SC deployment at 100m from MBS is duly
selected for the simulations presented in Section IV.B.
B. Power optimization using SC
Figure 8: CDF plot for three types of power adjustment
schemes of SCs
The CDF graph in Figure 8 shows that with SON
implementation, the user data rate is improved slightly than
without SON implementation. With SON implementation, the
SC coverage is sustained at 90% of all users. Without SON, the
coverage reduces to 60% of the original SC coverage. Figure 8
also shows that SCHEME1 that increases only the power of the
nearest two SCs in event of peer SC failure, shows slightly
better performance in terms of data rate for users than
SCHEME2 that requires all remaining SCs to increase power.
The coverage obtained by both schemes after power adjustment
is comparable, both maintaining about 90% of original
coverage after a peer SC failure, as compared to when SON is
not implemented. This shows that the use of SON is able to
sustain the capacity and coverage better than without the use of
SON.
The use of SCHEME1 is also more power efficient as it uses
about 0.02 % less power than SCHEME2 after power
adjustment. Although this figure may seem small, it will
translate to significant power savings when scaled to a larger
coverage area with more MBS and SC nodes. SCHEME1 will
also require less interference coordination between the
remaining active nodes.
V. CONCLUSION
In this work, a fixed deployment of SCs is proposed to
increase the data rate of the users. The SCs use SON to adjust
power when a peer SC fails. Two schemes of power
adjustment were investigated and it was found that the
proposed SCHEME1, which increases only the power of the
two nearest nodes to the failed SC, outperforms SCHEME2.
The e proposed SCHEME1 is easier to implement, ensures a
sustained coverage of 90% of the coverage area after a peer
SC fails, and uses less power than SCHEME2.
REFERENCES
[1] David Lo´ Pez-Pérez, Smail Güvenç, Guillaume De La
Roche, Marios Kountouris, Tony Q. S. Quek, Jie Zhang,
“Enhanced Intercell Interference Coordination Challenges
in Heterogeneous Networks”, IEEE Wireless
Communications, pp 22-30, June 2011
[2] Manoel F. Tenorio, “Self-Organizing Network For
Optimum Supervised Learning”, IEEE Transactions on
Neural Networks, Vol. I . No. I , pp 100- 109, March
[3] Jie Xiang, Member, Yan Zhang, Tor Skeie, Lang Xie,
“Downlink Spectrum Sharing for Cognitive Radio
Femtocell Networks”, IEEE Systems Journal, Vol. 4, No.
4, pp 524-534, December 2010
[4] M. Cenk Ert¨urk, ˙Ismail G¨uvenc¸, H¨useyin Arslan,
“Femtocell Gateway Scheduling for Capacity and Fairness
Improvement in Neighboring Femtocell Networks”, IEEE
21st International Symposium on Personal Indoor and
Mobile Radio Communications Workshops, pp 54-59,
2010
[5] Yong-Ping Zhang, Shulan Feng, Philipp Zhang, Liang Xia,
Yu-Chun Wu, Xiaotao Ren, “Inter-Cell Interference
Management in LTE-A Small-Cell Networks”, 77th IEEE
Vehicular Technology Conference, 2013
[6] Thakur, Rahul, Anik Sengupta, and C. Siva Ram Murthy.
“Improving capacity and energy efficiency of femtocell
based cellular network through cell biasing”, Modeling &
Optimization in Mobile, Ad Hoc & Wireless Networks
(WiOpt), 2013 11th International Symposium on. IEEE,
2013., pp 1-8.
[7] David L´opez-P´erez, Xiaoli Chu, Athanasios V.
Vasilakos, Holger Claussen, “Power Minimization Based
Resource Allocation for Interference Mitigation in
OFDMA Femtocell Networks”, IEEE Journal On Selected
Areas In Communications, Vol. 32, NO. 2, February 2014,
Pp 333-344
[8] Sharsheer, Mohammad, Basel Barakat, and Kamran
Arshad, “Coverage and Capacity Self-Optimisation In
LTE-Advanced Using Active Antenna System”, Wireless
Communications and Networking Conference Workshops
(WCNCW), 2016
[9] Kim, JuYeop, and Dong-Ho Cho, “A Joint Power And
Subchannel Allocation Scheme Maximizing System
Capacity In Dense Femtocell Downlink Systems”, 2009
IEEE 20th International Symposium on Personal, Indoor
and Mobile Radio Communications.
[10] Heli Zhang, Yongbin Wang, Hong Ji, “Resource
Optimization-Based Interference Management for Hybrid
Self-Organized Small-Cell Network”, IEEE Transactions
On Vehicular Technology, Vol. 65, No. 2, February 2016,
pp 936-946
[11] Henrik Klessig, David Öhmann,Andreas I. Reppas,
Haralampos Hatzikirou, Majid Abedi, Meryem Simsek,
Gerhard P. Fettweis, “From Immune Cells to Self-
Organizing Ultra-Dense Small Cell Networks”, IEEE
Journal On Selected Areas In Communications, Vol. 34,
No. 4, April 2016, pp 800- 811