Particle Swarm-Based Cell Range Expansion for Heterogeneous Mobile Networks

Traffic demand in wireless communication systems has emerged as a key issue over recent decades. An ever-increasing trend is projected for the next few years, with explosive data traffic expected to materialize and mobile users imposing new quality of service requirements. This growing traffic demand, combined with increasingly complex heterogeneous network (HetNet) scenarios, has presented ever more challenges for mobile network operators in terms of service, coverage, load balancing, and quality of service. Considering the traditional association mechanism based on maximum power received, HetNets tend to remain unbalanced, making it challenging to satisfy mobile users' traffic requirements. In this paper, instead of trying to maximize the achievable downlink rate per user, we couple the cell range expansion (CRE) technique with a particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm to maximize the number of users whose downlink requirements are met. The proposed scheme considers both the loads of base stations and the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) of user equipment to model an objective function that seeks to compute specific CRE bias values per small base station. The proposed scheme is also compared with some classical PSO implementations. Numerical results validate the performance of the proposed schemes, which effectively fulfill users' data traffic requirements by reducing network imbalance.