Mobile Traffic Offloading in Heterogeneous Networks-Based Small Cell Technology

In this paper, we propose an efficient heterogeneous network (HetNet) architecture with coexisting small cell technology to provide capacity and coverage expanding in 3G and 4G mobile networks. A hierarchical HetNet layout comprises of three layers macro-, metro- and femtocell. The metrocell is employed as an intermediate layer in the integrated femtocellular/macrocellular network, which operates in a complementary fashion, in order to manage the handover traffic between the edge layers. Consequently, the femtocell serves indoor traffic activity of femto users, while metrocell serves the outdoor traffic activities as well as the overflow traffic from femtocells. The overall HetNet is completed with the macrocell overlay layer, which serves only the macro users and the overflowed traffic from the underlay layer. Then, we develop a realistic teletraffic framework in order to evaluate the performance of the proposed HetNet. We show both analytically and by simulation that the proposed HetNet architecture with coexisting small cells is able to offload traffic from traditional macrocellular network in terms of reducing the blocking probability.