Capacity Optimised User Association in Planned Small Cell Deployment for Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

Small cells are deployed in Heterogeneous Networks (HetNet) to increase capacity per area. However, small cells become secondary user attachment choices due to their low powered transmissions, rendering their deployments redundant in achieving the intended capacity goals. Random deployment of small cells adds complexity to interference management in the HetNet, further raising challenges of Quality of Service (QoS) and load balancing. This work models a load balanced and QoS controlled user association scheme in HetNet, by proposing a fixed small cell deployment framework to achieve capacity optimisation. A non-biasing based user association to maximise HetNet capacity is proposed. Results showed that the proposed algorithm can be used to achieve high load balancing fairness in the HetNet without the complicated process of finding an optimal bias value for the small cell.