Managing hotspot regions in wireless/cellular networks with partial coverage picocells
Jingxiang Luo, Carey L. Williamson · 2008
In typical deployments of wireless and cellular networks, traffic hotspots can arise from the non-uniform geographic distribution of the mobile users, and the heavy-tailed nature of their network usage patterns. These hotspots of activity can degrade system performance, by increasing network utilization, wireless interference, call blocking, and even call dropping from failed handoffs for mobile users. One approach for network providers is to deploy a picocell as a targeted solution for a specific geographic region of interest. In this paper, we develop an analytical model to characterize the performance of a wireless/cellular network augmented with picocells. Our numerical results illustrate several tradeoffs between network cost, call blocking, and call dropping. Our model provides insights on how many picocells to deploy, where to place them, and their performance impacts.