Traffic Offloading Through Third-Party Cognitive Small Cells with Dual-Connectivity

Abstract

Traffic offloading for macrocell users with dual-connectivity through a third-party cognitive small cell is investigated in this paper. By guaranteeing the quality of service (QoS) of the macrocell users, the cognitive small cell is assumed to be able to use remaining resources for its own communication purpose. Particularly, two scenarios, one with successive interference cancellation (SIC) available at the small cell BS (SBS) and the other one without SIC at the SBS are considered. Iterative optimization based traffic offloading schemes are proposed for the two scenarios. Simulation results show that the proposed traffic offloading schemes outperform the scheme without traffic offloading. It is also shown that equipping SIC at the SBS is beneficial to both the small cell and the macrocell users.