Performance benefits of small cells and radio optimization in co-channel deployments

Performance of outdoor small cells with co-channel deployment of macro cells for DS-CDMA systems is considered in this paper. Although interference management techniques, such as self organising networks, have been developed and to some degree deployed there are many open issues especially related to the performance of small cells. Small cells address outdoor hotspots and have different characteristics to indoor self-installed femtocells, including higher power levels and open subscriber group connectivity. This paper describes downlink performance results to better understand key parameters and trade-offs for these co-channel deployments. We describe the parameter configuration, the amount of offload achieved, and throughput for users connected to small cells. The results show that orders of magnitude of throughput improvements can be achieved when as little as four small cells per macro are deployed. We also discuss self optimisation use cases and show some motivating performance results.