Conceptual Radio Resource Management Approach
in LTE Heterogeneous Networks using Small Cells
Number Variation
Nina Slamnik, Armin Okic, and Jasmin Musovic
Abstract— As a profound and evident future trend in the field
of mobile communication technologies development,
heterogeneous networks became one of the crucial points of
interests in wireless networks industry and academic research
societies. Considering heterogeneous networks as an inseparable
concept from LTE networks nowadays, which remain at position
of advanced cellular system, the researchers aim to observe and
solve the possible problems of inter-cell interference from the
aspect of radio resource management. Hence, the lattermost
trends consider heterogeneous networks through the process of
connecting energy-efficient small cells to macrocells, due to
undeniable importance of energy-efficient solution deployment,
which was briefly presented in this paper. Also, the combination
of radio resource management and heterogeneous networks
turned out to be a practical compound of modern
telecommunication techniques and technologies which provides a
huge spectrum of possibilities for improving telecommunication
services with minimized costs and increased efficiency of the whole
system. The concept of radio resource management used in this
paper was practically tested by small cells number variation
within LTE HetNet set up in NS3 simulation environment.
Keywords—heterogeneous networks; LTE; energy efficiency;
small cells; radio resource management, NS3 simulator
I. INTRODUCTION
A. Overview of Heterogeneous Networks
Although at initial stage, heterogeneous networks
development will inevitably continue in direction of information
technology and telecommunications convergence. Namely,
there are many different definitions of HetNet idea and
according to the most common intellection, heterogeneous
networks can be perceived as macro and small cells overlap in
the same access network, since the other assert that HetNet
represents a mobile network with Wi-Fi network functionalities
added, as the most important use case [1].
Also, due to implemented techniques of flexible spectrum
sharing and dynamic spectrum access, consideration of HetNet
as a cognitive radio becomes possible. In order of providing a
plausible set of definitions, HetNet represents a collection of
essential technologies and huge system capacities through the
integration of heterogeneous architecture from Wide Area
Network (WAN) to Personal Area Network (PAN), enabling
active and efficient connectivity which enriches the offer of
innovative services and increases customer satisfaction [1].
In general, HetNet reflects a group of layers which belong to
networks different by their cell size and access technology [2].
It is also necessary to emphasize the role of Radio Resource
Management (RRM) which will address the motivation for
heterogeneous networks development, and will be discussed in
the following subsection.
Now, if we observe LTE as a background of heterogeneous
network of interest, it is primarily needed to mention the feature
supported by LTE – Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple
Access (OFDMA), which represents a superior solution for
inter-cell interference and selective frequency fading in
comparison with Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA),
supported by predecessors. Unfortunately, inter-cell interference
is still capable of degrading OFDMA systems performance and
inducting an efficient system for RRM is a must. The modern
telecommunications trends pay a lot of effort in connecting
energy-efficient cell development to small cells. This type of cell
will definitely attract even more attention and evoke more
interests in academic and industrial societies, due to next five
advantages:
• Indoor coverage improvement – In order to avoid
coverage holes in macrocells, it is necessary to deploy
femtocells in indoor environment. It will certainly bring more
precise coverage due to close connection of femtocells and
indoor base stations.
• Traffic offload – Femtocells are capable of reducing
traffic congestion in macro base stations by redirecting traffic
from indoor broadband lines.
• Cost reduction – Installation of femtocells is much
simpler and more profitable than macrocells, due to simple plug
and play method of installation and reducing backhauling costs
through indoor broadband connections.
• Power consumption reduction – The smaller cell the
less power transmission needed.
• Quality of Service (QoS) improvement – Femtocells are
implemented to serve small groups of customers what converges
to improved QoS [3] [4].
 B. Overview of Radio Resource Management
The rapid development of wireless technologies brings the
enormous growth of mobile subscribers’ number, outnumbering
fixed line nowadays. All the superb services which address the
joint of multimedia and mobile communication requires
challenging prerequisites in entire network infrastructure and
architecture. Since the problem which was previously mentioned
is only partly solved by LTE technology deployment, radio
resource utilization enhancement strongly requires RRM
mechanisms’ implementation. This includes strategies and
algorithms in order to control parameters such as power
transmission, subscribers’ allocation, beam forming, data rates,
handover criteria, modulation schemes, error coding schemes
etc. Hence, RRM in heterogeneous LTE cellular systems scopes
several functionalities, which will be listed below [5] [6] [7]:
• Resource allocation among macrocell and small cells
– Resources in heterogeneous networks need to be reallocated
from macrocell into several small cells, according to the selected
approach of radio resource management.
• Packet scheduling – Dynamic packet scheduling is one
of the main RRM functionalities dedicated to Medium Access
Control (MAC) layer, providing allocation of Physical Resource
Block (PRB) for users every Transmission Time Interval (TTI)
by focusing on spectral efficiency and overall throughput
maximization.
• Link adaptation – It also represents MAC functionality
and aims to achieve high throughput per every user, using
Adaptive Modulation and Coding (ACM).
• Radio access control and handover management – It is
positioned at third layer of LTE protocol stack as a resource
control entity which is enabled to make a decision of accepting
a new radio carrier, based on QoS requirements and radio
resource availability. These mentioned basis also support radio
resource utilization maximization.
However, small cells deployment brings different challenges
and problems in process of RRM. First of all, interference
management will stay for a crucial point which needs to be
considered. Therefore, small cells are prone to interference
generation, both to eNodeB and to neighbor cells. Accordingly,
there is a particular distinction of two types of interference in
LTE – cross-tier and co-tier. The first one is generated between
femtocells and macrocells, since the other represents a
phenomena of two femtocells making an influence on each other
[8]. As the other challenge, radio resource utilization needs to
achieve target peak data rate for downlink and uplink, specified
as 1 Gb/s and 500 Mb/s, respectively [9]. The recommended
solution consists of frequency reuse proposal schemes.
However, any system expectedly requires fairness in radio
resource distribution, so this has to be considered in RRM
approach too. Also, it is clear that positioning small cells in
crowded places cannot achieve adequate QoS per every service.
Due to potentially small number of channels dedicated by
eNodeB to small cell, the task to satisfy QoS requirements is
unfortunately still undone. In order of completion a set of
challenges, we will mention two types of complexity in RRM –
calculation and implementation complexities. Briefly,
implementation complexity addresses the size of overhead of
signalization and the amount of data exchanged by base stations
in order to implement an RRM scheme. Hence, calculation time
is also limited by size of TTI period [7].
II. CHARACTERIZATION OF DE-EE TRADEOFF IN RRM
The enormous popularity of “wireless lifestyle” shows the
advantages of being wirelessly connected every time anywhere.
However, the background of convenient, useful and interesting
services provided by HetNet for example, suffers from excessive
energy consumption and this trend grows steadily. For that
reason, both service provider and user have to pay more attention
to prioritizing energy saving. This approach can be implemented
through the tradeoff between deployment efficiency – energy
efficiency (DE-EE). Hence, the tradeoff alludes green
architecture implementation, which mainly motivates providers
to reduce network configuration complexity, cost and
consumption. The paper [10] suggests proper analysis of DE-EE
tradeoff and provides results which present the interrelation
between these two antipodal points, accentuating the complexity
of its precise evaluation. Also, this paper conducts the analysis
by distinguishing values of energy efficiency depending on cell
size. According to the research, small cells contribution to
energy efficiency improvement turns out to be considerable.
Also, this paper supports the main idea presented by green
architecture, which yields energy saving by turning the power
amplifiers of idle base stations off. The idle base stations are
considered as samples which transmit no signal, since energy
consumption counts only when base station transits to active
state. Authors of the paper also include the differentiation of
environment type, using the parameter α. Hence, they conclude
that the main contribution in entire energy consumption belongs
to base station transmission process, when it comes to rural and
suburban areas. This part of consumption decreases by
increasing the cell radius. Contrary, the opposite conclusion is
correct when we consider urban areas. Also, increasing radius
values above 500m brings another consumption increment due
to transition from small to macrocell, which requires new base
stations installation. Therefore, the urban areas have much more
significant energy consumption with huge radius, which leads to
commitment to small cells implementation. Hence, the
procedure of RRM by DE-EE tradeoff consists of following
steps: DE calculation based on information about maximum
available budget and dedicated throughput, calculation of
maximum possible energy efficiency in this kind of scenario,
and finally determination of area specific radius value based on
curve which interrelates DE and EE [10].
Concluding by the above mentioned, the accomplishment of
DE-EE tradeoff can be achieved by small cells deployment. This
undoubtedly impacts throughput per user enhancement and
overall energy consumption reduction. The next section briefly
presents the simulation results which provide interesting
conclusions about corresponding number of small cells
deployed in system.
III. SIMULATION

In this chapter there is a brief explanation of simulation and

simulated results that lead to interesting conclusions related to
different deployments of network using number variations of
femtocells in one LTE heterogeneous network.
Simulation brings out conclusions related to matter of
deployment techniques and approaches while considering radio
resource management in LTE heterogeneous network that uses
partitioning techniques with femtocells among one macrocell.
Basic idea of this simulation is to set exactly the same Figure 1 - Topology of the network used in different scenarios of the
environment for different scenarios and only to change number simulation
of femtocells. In all scenarios there is a one macrocell, since UEs
are stationary, in order to provide same environment, and Table 2 - Parameters for eNodeBs and UEs
positioned at the same places.
Parameter Value
A. Simulation configuration and parameters
The LTE network is used, with one PGW and one remote Tx power of macro eNB 30 dBm
host on the Internet side that has a role of application server Tx power of femto eNB 20 dBm
delivering and creating the traffic using UDP transfer protocol.
UEs are connected to the application server through the Height of BS 10 m
eNodeBs, one macro and different number of femto, according
Bandwidth (UL and DL) 25 MHz
to the different scenarios.
Table 1 - Parameters for application server and traffic generation SNR (eNB and UE) 6 dB and 9 dB

Parameter Value
Fig.1 shows the topology of the simulated network. The
MTU 1500 positions of the nodes are stationary and varying of number of
Interval between packets 100 ms femtocells just included or exclude corresponding femto nodes.

Data rate 5 Mbps B. Results of the simulation

As already described, we consider an LTE HetNet scenario
Transfer delay 0.010 s where femtocells are deployed among one macrocell.
Simulation duration 1s From the Fig. 2 it’s noticeable that using higher number of
femtocells beside macrocell gives better results, providing
higher average throughput for both uplink and downlink. The
For propagation path loss model Cost231 is used, simulating biggest difference is for adding just one femtocell, and adding
urban environment. more than one femtocell brings better results but it is also
UEs are attaching to LTE base station with the strongest signal important to notice that improvement has its own limits.
in the calculating position of the UE.
On the MAC layer Round Robin scheduler is used.
For antennas on the BSs side isotropic antennas are used.
Number of femto nodes is varied between 0 and 4, also the
number of UEs is varied and takes values of 30 and 40, in order
to provide more fulfilled results.
 Downlink Uplink Downlink Uplink

5 20 18.20 16.44
3.92 3.93 3.75 3.97 3.644.01 13.… 16.66

Average SINR [DBM]

Average throughput [KBPS]

14.48 14.64 15.82

4 3.26 3.40 13.02 13.70
15
3 2.30 9.97
1.78 10
2
1 5

0 0
0 1 2 3 4 0 1 2 3 4
Number of femtocells Number of femtocells

Figure 2 - Average SINR with number of femtocells variation for 30

Figure 3- Average throughput with number of femtocells variation UEs
for 30 UEs
Results shown on the Fig. 5 giving the same conclusion just
like in the case of 30 UEs. Difference is that making bigger
Also, noticing that adding of fourth femtocell is actually number of UEs leads to bigger value of average SINR for
lowering average throughput is crucial, because the position of downlink, because the coverage of UEs is denser.
the fourth femtocell (Fig 1.) doesn’t have an important role in
IV. CONCLUSIONS
providing better channel state for the users as it is in the between
of the two BSs. The UE is attached to the BS with the strongest In this paper, it’s shown how different deployment
signal strength, and because macrocell is really close to the approaches can make positive effects on the general
fourth femtocell, the added femtocell just makes interference in performances of the network.
this case. This leads to the effect of lowering average
The achieved results show an enhancement of the average
throughput. One more thing important for these results is that
throughput and SINR for UE Also the results shown that design
lowering average throughput effect only affects downlink,
of the topology has one of the most important roles in the
because UEs and BSs don’t work on the same frequencies.
deployment of heterogeneous networks, because with the wrong
From the scenario with 40 UEs (Fig. 3) we can see that the positioning is possible to decrease performances. It’s shown that
same effect is achieved, making lowering of average throughput adding of additional femtocells makes an impact for SINR
when adding fourth femtocell even bigger. performances, this is important in the cases of coverage holes
that appears in the macrocells. This conclusion leads to
In the case of observing SINR fluctuations in the scenarios statement that is possible to get more energy efficient network
of varying number of femtocells among one macrocell is by changing deployment of the network.
possible to notice interesting results. Fig. 4 shows dependence
of the average SINR for different numbers of femtocells and for
30 UEs. It’s possible to notice that the value of SINR for uplink
is not raising monotonously, this is because attaching of UEs to
the BSs is according to the strongest signal strength of the Downlink Uplink
downlink. This makes that SINR for downlink gets higher with 20 15.56 16.64
17.28 16.46 16.34
more femtocells. 14.98 15.32 15.51
Average SINR [DBM]

14.70
15 11.83
Downlink Uplink
10
Average throughput [KBPS]

5
4.06
3.623.90 5
4 3.47
3.04 3.293.59 3.28
3 2.18 0
1.82 0 1 2 3 4
2
Number of femtocells
1
0
0 1 2 3 4 Figure 5 - Average SINR with number of femtocells variation for 40
UEs
Number of femtocells

Figure 4 - Average throughput with number of femtocells variation

for 40 UEs
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