Mobile small cell deployment for next generation cellular networks

With the rapid growth of mobile broadband traffic, adopting small cell is a promising trend for operators to improve network capacity with low cost. However, static small cells cannot be flexibly placed to fulfill time/space-varying traffic. The static small cells might stay in idle or under-utilized mode during some time periods, which wastes resources. Therefore, this paper utilizes the mobile small cell concept and studies the deployment problem for mobile small cells. The objective is to maximize the service time provided by mobile small cells for all users. If a finite number of mobile small cells can serve more users for more time, the mobile small cell deployment will have more gains. Specifically, we show an interesting trade-off in the service time maximization. Then, we prove our target problem is NP-hard and propose an efficient mobile small cell deployment algorithm to deal with the trade-off to maximize the total service time. We construct a series of simulations with realistic parameter settings to evaluate the performance of our proposed algorithm. Compared with a static small cell deployment algorithm and a random mobile small cell deployment algorithm, the simulation results show that our proposed scheme can significantly increase the total service time provided for all users.