Double spectrum small cell (DSSC) for discovering inter-frequency small cell in HetNet

In this paper, a double-spectrum small cell (DSSC) is proposed as a small cell approach to handle the strong co-channel interference and the handover energy consumption problems faced by the conventional small cell approaches, which either use the same spectrum for both macro-cell and small cells, or totally different spectrums for macro-cell and small cells. In the proposed DSSC approach, the co-channel frequency (spectrum used by the macro-cell) is reused by all the small cells. Each small cell can also use a dedicated spectrum (high frequency used at the small cells). The co-channel frequency can be used as an indicator to help UEs to find the dedicated spectrum for small cells with less power consumption for small cell detection and no loss of offloading opportunity. Simulation results, obtained in a scenario where a reference UE in a nomadic state and the small cells are spatially distributed as Poisson Point Process (PPP) show that the proposed approach can significantly reduce the energy consumption for different small cell densities.