Carrier aggregation (CA) and small cells are two distinct features of
next-generation cellular networks. Cellular networks with small cells take on a
very heterogeneous characteristic, and are often referred to as HetNets. In
this paper, we introduce a load-aware model for CA-enabled \textit{multi}-band
HetNets. Under this model, the impact of biasing can be more appropriately
characterized; for example, it is observed that with large enough biasing, the
spectral efficiency of small cells may increase while its counterpart in a
fully-loaded model always decreases. Further, our analysis reveals that the
peak data rate does not depend on the base station density and transmit powers;
this strongly motivates other approaches e.g. CA to increase the peak data
rate. Last but not least, different band deployment configurations are studied
and compared. We find that with large enough small cell density, spatial reuse
with small cells outperforms adding more spectrum for increasing user rate.
More generally, universal cochannel deployment typically yields the largest
rate; and thus a capacity loss exists in orthogonal deployment. This
performance gap can be reduced by appropriately tuning the HetNet coverage
distribution (e.g. by optimizing biasing factors).Comment: submitted to IEEE Transactions on Communications, Nov. 201