Phantom cell realization in LTE and its performance analysis

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a tremendous increase in the cellular traffic due to the availability of wide range of devices: smart phones, net-books, tablets, etc. The existing cellular networks will be unable to cater to the increasing demands in near future, thus we need technological enhancements in the cellular infrastructure to meet the ever increasing user requirements. Various approaches have been suggested to increase the existing cellular capacity and provide higher data rates, some of which include deployment of small cells under the coverage area of Macro cells, where a cell denotes the region covered by a particular base station (BS). However, since these small cells cover small regions there exists a significant handover signalling overhead. We suggest an approach where small cells, called Phantom cells, are deployed within the Macro cell coverage area, and the existing Macro BS functions as the centralized controller for all the Phantom BSs deployed within its range. Phantom BSs act as a supplement to the existing Radio Access Network in the LTE infrastructure where it handles the data plane (D-plane) and Macro BSs handle the control plane (C-plane). This paper proposes the definitions of Copiane and D-plane, the modifications in the user equipment (UE) protocol stack which enable the concurrent operation with dual BSs (Phantom and Macro). Mechanisms are developed for the communication of a Phantom BS with a Macro BS over the new interface (X3 interface). NS-3 simulations were performed incorporating the designed architecture for Phantom based HetNets and a significant improvement in UE throughput is observed in comparision with legacy networks comprising of Macro BS.