Outage probability analysis of mobile small cells over LTE-A networks

Cellular operators have concluded that small cell deployments are a very cost-effective and quick solution to meet the ever growing demands on capacity and coverage in cellular networks for indoor and outdoor environments. While traveling in public transit vehicles, cellular subscribers usually experience poor signal reception and low bandwidth. We hence consider deploying small cells onboard (i.e., mobile small cells) such vehicles. This should enhance subscribers' quality of experience (QoE). We consider a Small Base Station (SBS) mounted in a public transit bus (i.e., mobile SBS) to serve onboard users. The mobile SBS aggregates users' traffic to and from the macroBSs. To further extract the underlying rich multipath-Doppler diversities resulting from the fast mobility and the associated selective fading channel, a pre-coded transmission is deployed in the mobile SBS.We examine the achievable gain from enabling aggregation through mobile SBS in terms of the outage probability. We derive a tight-bound closed-form expression for the outage probability in the downlink (DL). Our results indicate that significant gain in outage probability and coverage are achievable.