Analysis of Energy-Efficiency in Ultra-Dense Networks: Determining FAP-to-UE Ratio via Stochastic Geometry

Femtocells are envisioned as a key solution to embrace the ever-increasing high data rate and thus are extensively deployed. However, the dense and random deployments of femtocell access points (FAPs) induce severe intercell inference that in turn may degrade the performance of spectral efficiency. Hence, unrestrained proliferation of FAPs may not acquire a net throughput gain. Besides, given that numerous FAPs deployed in ultra-dense networks (UDNs) lead to significant energy consumption, the amount of FAPs deployed is worthy of more considerations. Nevertheless, little existing works present an analytical result regarding the optimal FAP density for a given User Equipment (UE) density. This paper explores the realistic scenario of randomly distributed FAPs in UDN and derives the coverage probability via Stochastic Geometry. From the analytical results, coverage probability is strictly increasing as the FAP-to-UE ratio increases, yet the growing rate of coverage probability decreases as the ratio grows. Therefore, we can consider a specific FAP-to-UE ratio as the point where further increasing the ratio is not cost-effective with regards to the requirements of communication systems. To reach the optimal FAP density, we can deploy FAPs in line with peak traffic and randomly switch off FAPs to keep the optimal ratio during off-peak hours. Furthermore, considering the unbalanced nature of traffic demands in the temporal and spatial domain, dynamically and carefully choosing the locations of active FAPs would provide advantages over randomization. Besides, with a huge FAP density in UDN, we have more potential choices for the locations of active FAPs and this adds to the demand for a strategic sleeping policy.