Cell-Sweeping: A New Paradigm for Cells Deployment in Radio Access Networks

Good network coverage is an important element of Quality of Service (QoS) provision that mobile cellular operators aim to provide. The established requirements for the existing Fifth Generation (5G) and the emerging scenarios for upcoming Sixth Generation (6G) cellular communication technologies highly depend on the coverage quality that the network is able to provide. In addition, some proposed 5G solutions such as densification, are complex, costly, and tend to degrade network coverage due to increased interference which is critical for the cell-edge performance. In this direction, we present a novel concept of cell-sweeping for coverage enhancement in cellular networks. One of the main objectives behind this mechanism relies on overcoming the cell-edge problem which directly translates into better network coverage. In sequence, the concept operation is introduced and compared to the conventional static cell scenarios. These comparisons target mostly the benefits at the cell-edge locations. Additionally, the use of schedulers that take advantage of the sweeping system is expected to extend the cell-edge benefits to the entire network. This is observed when deploying cell-sweeping with the Proportional Fair (PF) scheduler. A 5th-percentile improvement of 125% and an average throughput increase of 35% were obtained through system level simulations. The preliminary results presented in this paper suggest that cell-sweeping can be adopted as an emerging technology for future Radio Access Network (RAN) deployments.