Cellular networks are in a major transition from a carefully planned set of
large tower-mounted base-stations (BSs) to an irregular deployment of
heterogeneous infrastructure elements that often additionally includes micro,
pico, and femtocells, as well as distributed antennas. In this paper, we
develop a tractable, flexible, and accurate model for a downlink heterogeneous
cellular network (HCN) consisting of K tiers of randomly located BSs, where
each tier may differ in terms of average transmit power, supported data rate
and BS density. Assuming a mobile user connects to the strongest candidate BS,
the resulting Signal-to-Interference-plus-Noise-Ratio (SINR) is greater than 1
when in coverage, Rayleigh fading, we derive an expression for the probability
of coverage (equivalently outage) over the entire network under both open and
closed access, which assumes a strikingly simple closed-form in the high SINR
regime and is accurate down to -4 dB even under weaker assumptions. For
external validation, we compare against an actual LTE network (for tier 1) with
the other K-1 tiers being modeled as independent Poisson Point Processes. In
this case as well, our model is accurate to within 1-2 dB. We also derive the
average rate achieved by a randomly located mobile and the average load on each
tier of BSs. One interesting observation for interference-limited open access
networks is that at a given SINR, adding more tiers and/or BSs neither
increases nor decreases the probability of coverage or outage when all the
tiers have the same target-SINR.Comment: IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, vol. 30, no. 3, pp.
550 - 560, Apr. 201
