Throughput enhancement through femto‐cell deployment

Abstract

Abstract This paper studies the impact of a femto‐cell underlay deployment that shares radio frequency resources with urban macro‐cells. Due to their random and uncoordinated deployment, femto‐cells potentially cause destructive interference to macro‐cells and vice versa . On the other hand, femto‐cells promise to substantially enhance the spectral efficiency due to an increased reuse of radio resources. The performance of networks with indoor Home Evolved NodeB (HeNB) deployment is compared to a system where all users, including indoor users, are served by the outdoor macro Evolved NodeB (eNB). In addition, the impact of closed‐access and open‐access femto‐cell operation is examined. It is demonstrated that significant capacity gains can be achieved through such HeNB deployment, regardless of whether closed‐access or open‐access is considered. Results clearly indicate that the capacity gains through femto‐cell deployment outweigh the additional interference they introduce. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.