Capacity and Energy Efficiency of Picocell Deployment in LTE-A Networks

In this paper, we show the impact of deploying picocells on the capacity and energy efficiency of LTE-A networks. We analyze the Erlang-like capacity of a network composed of macro networks only and study the impact of introducing a number of picocells per site. Knowing that the capacity is not the only factor that will drive the evolution of the network, we also consider the energy efficiency as a Key Performance Indicator (KPI). Our results show that, in some scenarios, introducing picocells is a good network densification method as they achieve a higher network capacity with good energy efficiency.