Impact of Base Station Cooperation on Cell Planning

Base station cooperation (BSC) has been identified as a key radio access technology for next-generation cellular networks such as LTE-Advanced. BSC impacts cell planning, which is the methodical selection of base station (BS) sites, and BS equipment configuration for cost-effective cellular networks. In this paper, the impact of BSC on cell plan parameters (coverage, traffic, handover, and cost), as well as additional cell planning steps required for BSC are discussed. Results show that BSC maximizes its gains over noncooperation (NC) in a network wherein interference from cooperating BSs is the main limitation. Locations exist where NC may produce higher throughputs, therefore dynamic or semistatic switching between BSC and NC, called fractional BSC, is recommended. Because of interference from noncooperating BSs, the gains of BSC over NC are upper bounded, and diminishes at greater intersite distances because of noise. This encourages smaller cell sizes, higher transmit powers, and dynamic clustering of cooperative BSs.