Foam evolution inspired modeling for staged construction of ultra-dense small cell networks

Small cells (SCs) are expected to be ultra-densely deployed in or close to the traffic hot-spots in the fifth generation (5G) mobile networks to provide wireless capacity cost-effectively. Traffic hot-spots change over time, which means SCs cannot be deployed in a one-off manner as macrocells normally do, rather they should be constructed in a staged process. Hence, mathematical models that capture the time-varying staged-construction process, are urgently needed for operators to effectively predict the construction period, but are currently lacking. In this paper, inspired by the foam bursting process-a natural phenomenon that can be observed in daily life such as hand-washing, we first propose a novel model that can predict the time-varying expectation and logarithmic variance of SC coverage areas. Then, we verify the model by real network deployment cases. Additionally, in order to extract parameters from historical base station deployment data, a parameter estimation algorithm is designed and verified. The findings of the paper reveal that mobile operators should construct ultra-dense SC networks in a staged manner like how larger foams split into smaller ones.