On Small Cell Network Deployment: A Comparative Study of Random and Grid Topologies

Small cell network is designed to provide mobile services to hot spots by deploying a large number of small access points (APs). As traditional network deployment requires costly AP location acquisition, cost-effective network deployment is necessary for small cell networks. We investigate this question by studying the network performance in terms of spatial outage and throughput of a completely random topology in comparison to that of a perfectly regular topology. Using a stochastic geometry model of user SINR in a random topology, our results show that the performance gap in terms of user SINR guarantee becomes narrow when the network density increases during the network densification. By a massive deployment, the loss is about 1 dB. Besides, it is at about 18% loss in user average throughput. These comparative results would provide helpful information to choose an appropriate deployment. In particular, as far as this relatively small performance loss can be compensated by other network control algorithms, the massive random deployment of a small cell network becomes attractive considering the cost reduction by the given deployment freedom.