Performance analysis of small-cell base station with cellular and WiFi RATs

Abstract

As a multiple radio access technologies (multi-RAT) solution to treat increasing mobile traffic, small-cell base station (SBS) using integration of cellular and WiFi technology has attracted interest from academia, industry, and mobile network operators (MNOs). SBS with multi-RAT can steer their traffic between cellular and WiFi RATs by considering channel condition of each RAT. SBS with multi-RAT has different characteristics based on cellular and WiFi RAT. Performance of SBSs with cellular RAT is mainly affected by signal to interference and noise ratio (SINR) of receiver. This has been analyzed in many research studies by using a point process. However, performance of SBSs with WiFi RAT is rarely analyzed despite the different characteristic of WiFi RAT. In this paper, we introduce the analytical model to estimate performance of WiFi RAT using IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function (DCF) technique. By using our analytical model, we estimate the number of competing and hidden nodes which mainly influence the performance of WiFi RAT. Results of our analytical model are compared with Monte Carlo simulation, and it is shown that our model can estimate the number of competing and hidden nodes in multi-RAT SBS network.