Analysis of Carrier Deployment Strategies for LTE-A HetNets with Multicell Cooperation

In this paper, it is studied how to best utilize two carriers (F1 and F2) in a heterogeneous network (HetNet) where both the macro and small cells are deployed. In order to achieve the optimal system performance, two distinct state-of-the-art multi-cell cooperation techniques are applied: namely, enhanced inter-cell interference coordination (eICIC) for cases with cochannel
deployment and inter-site carrier aggregation (CA) for cases where the macro and small cells use different carriers. Extensive performance results are presented under realistic timevariant traffic conditions. It is concluded that both eICIC and inter-site CA offer attractive end-user performance benefits. As
an example, inter-site CA and eICIC between the macro and small cells is observed to offer an impressive end-user throughput gain of 70%􀀀80% for certain cases. The carrier usage resulting in the best downlink end-user performance is found to be F1for the macros, and both F1 and F2 on the small cells, for the considered scenario.