Budget constrained small cell deployment planning for heterogeneous LTE networks

We address the problem of small cell deployment planning in LTE networks. The wireless network is modeled with multiple heterogeneities such as hotspots in the mobile user distribution, site-specific acquisition costs and different types of small cell base stations with different cost and transmit power. The objective is to lower the maximum load of any macro cell in the network, by deploying the optimal types of small cells in the optimal locations. We introduce a problem formulation that accounts for the mentioned heterogeneities and an approximated linear formulation, which achieves better performance than existing iterative methods.