  This paper presents switched Multi- Element Antennas (MEAs) as a simple, yet
effective, method of enhancing the performance of small cell heterogeneous
networks and compensating for the small cell base station sub-optimal
placement. The switched MEA system is a low-cost system which enables the small
cell to dynamically direct its transmission power toward locations of high user
density, in other words demand hotspots. Our simulation results show that small
cell base stations equipped with switched MEA systems offer greater performance
than base stations equipped with omni-directional antennas in terms of both the
number of users that can be served (and hence offloaded from the macrocell
network) and in terms of overall network capacity. We also compare the
performance of the switched MEA with fixed directional antennas and show that
fixed-directional antennas can only outperform the switched MEA if the
misalignment between their direction of transmission and the direction to the
demand hotspot is less than 22.5 degrees.
