Mixed Virtual Small Cell Deployment Strategy With Load-Aware Clustering and Cell Head-Qualified UE Willingness Consideration
Achmad Rizal Danisya, Gamantyo Hendrantoro, Puji Handayani · IEEE Access · 2026
Bandwidth-intensive applications and User Equipment (UE) mobility demand an adaptive Radio Access Network (RAN) that can detect user hotspots to maintain service quality. Virtual Small Cells (VSCs) address this need via beamforming, yet Cell-Head-based VSCs (CHVSC/UE-VBS) introduce additional hardware requirements and are vulnerable to uncertainty in qualified-UE (qUE) willingness to act as a Cell Head (CH). To bridge this practicality gap, we propose a Mixed VSC (MVSC) framework that switches between direct VSC service (DVSC) and CHVSC operation according to qUE willingness. This mode switching alters channel capacity, requiring RB-feasible member association adjustments—an aspect largely absent from clustering-only VSC studies. We therefore develop Load-Aware Affinity Propagation Clustering (LAPC), which integrates predicted link capacity and RB demand into a greedy refinement process that iteratively adjusts cluster membership to mitigate persistent underload/overload across DVSC and CHVSC modes. Monte Carlo simulations compare LAPC against K-Means, MAPC, and GAPC-SNR. Results show that LAPC improves RB utilization while serving more UEs and increasing aggregate throughput, achieving mean RB-utility gains of 8.68 and 10.66 percentage points over K-Means and GAPC-SNR, respectively, in the evaluated MVSC scenario.