Best Signal Quality in Cellular Networks: Asymptotic Properties and Applications to Mobility Management in Small Cell Networks

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the asymptotic behavior of the best signal quality in dense small cell networks, deriving distributional properties and proposing an optimized cell scanning scheme to enhance user throughput.

Contribution

It provides the first asymptotic analysis of maximum signal strength in small cell networks and introduces an optimized random cell scanning method.

Findings

Maximum signal strength converges to a Gumbel distribution asymptotically.

Signal strength is asymptotically independent of interference.

Proposed cell scanning scheme improves user data throughput.

Abstract

The quickly increasing data traffic and the user demand for a full coverage of mobile services anywhere and anytime are leading mobile networking into a future of small cell networks. However, due to the high-density and randomness of small cell networks, there are several technical challenges. In this paper, we investigate two critical issues: \emph{best signal quality} and \emph{mobility management}. Under the assumptions that base stations are uniformly distributed in a ring shaped region and that shadowings are lognormal, independent and identically distributed, we prove that when the number of sites in the ring tends to infinity, then (i) the maximum signal strength received at the center of the ring tends in distribution to a Gumbel distribution when properly renormalized, and (ii) it is asymptotically independent of the interference. Using these properties, we derive the distribution of the best signal quality. Furthermore, an optimized random cell scanning scheme is proposed, based on the evaluation of the optimal number of sites to be scanned for maximizing the user data throughput.