Coordinated multipoint in heterogeneous networks with overlapping microcell expanded regions

As a way of meeting a substantial increase in traffic demands, the concept of Heterogeneous Networks or HetNets was introduced. A HetNet is a multi-tier cellular network consisting of a macrocell tier overlaid with a microcell tier. Typically, the transmission power a Macrocell base station (BS) is higher than the transmission power of a Microcell BS. One of the goals of a HetNet is to offload traffic from the macrocell BS to the microcell BS. This purpose can be achieved by expanding the microcell region so that more users will associate with it. This causes significant cross-tier interference which can be remedied by utilizing coordinated multipoint (CoMP) within the microcell expanded region (ER). Our proposed methodology considers the effect of overlapping ERs and uses tools from stochastic geometry to analyze performance metrics in terms of outage probability.