Joint Optimization of Area Spectral Efficiency and Energy Efficiency for Two-Tier Heterogeneous Ultra-Dense Networks

Being a promising candidate technology for the fifth-generation cellular systems, the ultra-dense network (UDN) is capable of improving the system throughput by deploying more small cells (SCs) in the existing macro-cells (MCs). In most cases, base stations (BSs) from both the MCs tier and SCs tier are modeled as two independent homogeneous Poisson point processes (PPPs) or other point processes derived from a PPP. In the previous works, the area spectral efficiency (ASE) and energy efficiency (EE) are evaluated from a typical user's perspective, and this method works well in single-user scenarios. However, there are multiple users sharing spectral resources in practical cellular systems, and the above-mentioned method cannot work in these scenarios. Therefore, we investigate the ASE and EE from the perspective of a typical BS. Analytical results show that the ASE increases with the increasing SCs density, which means that deploying more SCs in the MCs coverage area is a feasible way to enhance the system throughput. However, the energy consumption of the entire network is increasing as the SCs density increases. Therefore, we employ the firefly algorithm to jointly optimize the ASE and EE for the two-tier heterogeneous UDN. Finally, the optimal system parameters can be found under two fixed weights for the ASE and EE, respectively.