Energy-aware enterprise femtocell deployment

Large-scale enterprise femtocell deployments can significantly impact the performance and energy consumption of the underlying wireless networks that support them. Naive femtocell deployments can lead to higher overall network energy usage, while optimized femtocell deployments can increase total network connectivity and reduce macrocell energy consumption. This paper approaches femtocell deployment as a combinatorial optimization problem. We first consider accelerated greedy algorithms using one of two metrics: femtocell coverage and area spectral efficiency. Then, motivated by an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of each metric, we introduce an algorithm that takes the weighted sum of both metrics. We evaluate our algorithms using extensive simulations, and find that our weighted sum algorithm decreases outage probability by up to 30% relative to existing greedy approaches. Furthermore, our algorithm can lead to a reduction in total network energy usage by up to 14%.