A Comparison Study of Coupled and Decoupled Uplink Heterogeneous Cellular Networks

The evolution of mobile cellular networks has brought great changes of network architecture. For example, heterogeneous cellular network (HetNet) and Ultra dense network (UDN) have been proposed as promising techniques for 5G systems. Dense deployment of base stations (BSs) allows a mobile user to be able to access multiple BSs. Meanwhile the unbalance between UL and DL in HetNets, such as different received SINR threshold and traffic load, etc., becomes increasingly obvious. All these factors naturally inspire us to consider decoupling of uplink and downlink in radio access network. An interesting question is that whether the decoupled uplink (UL) /downlink (DL) access (DUDA) mode outperforms traditional coupled uplink (UL)/downlink (DL) access (CUDA) mode or not, and how big is the performance difference in terms of system rate, spectrum efficiency (SE) and energy efficiency (EE), etc. in HetNets. In this paper, we aim at thoroughly comparing the performance of the two modes based on stochastic geometry theory. In our analytical model, we take into account dynamic transmit power control in UL communication. Specifically, we employ fractional power control (FPC) to model a location-dependent channel state. Numerical results reveals that DUDA mode significantly outperforms CUDA mode in system rate, SE and EE in HetNets. In addition, DUDA mode improves load balance and potential fairness for both different type BSs and associated UEs. Keywords—HetNet, coupled and decoupled uplink access, system performance, FPC, stochastic geometry