Outage Analysis of Offloading in Heterogeneous Networks: Composite Fading Channels

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the impact of composite fading channels on user outage probability in heterogeneous networks with small cells, considering various fading effects and small cell densities, providing analytical expressions and approximations.

Contribution

It introduces analytical models for outage probability in HetNets considering composite fading channels and proposes efficient approximations for complex fading distributions.

Findings

Outage probability increases with higher shadowing and multipath effects.

Small cell density significantly reduces outage probability.

Proposed approximations effectively model complex fading distributions.

Abstract

Small cells deployment is one of the most significant long-term strategic policies of the mobile network operators. In heterogeneous networks (HetNets), small cells serve as offloading spots in the radio access network to offload macro users (MUs) and their associated traffic from congested macrocells. In this paper, we perform analytical analysis and investigate how the radio propagation effects such as multipath and shadowing and small cell base station density affect MUs' offloading to small cell network (SCN). In particular, we exploit composite fading channels in our evaluation when an MU is offloaded to SCN with varying small and macro cell densities in the stochastic HetNets framework. We derive the expressions for outage probability (equivalently success probability) of the MU in macro network and SCN for two different cases, viz.: i) Nakagami-lognormal channel fading; ii) time-shared (combined) shadowed/unshadowed channel fading. We propose efficient approximations for the probability density functions of the channel fading (power) for the above-mentioned fading distributions that do not have closed-form expressions employing Gauss-Hermite integration and finite exponential series, respectively. Finally, the outage probability performance of MU with and without offloading options/services is analyzed for various settings of fading channels.