Efficient resource management in OFDMA Femto cells

Abstract

Femto cells are a cost-effective means of providing ubiquitous connectivity in future broadband wireless networks. While their primary purpose has been to improve coverage in current solutions, their decreased cell sizes in turn also provide improved cell capacity through increased spatial reuse. The demand for bandwidth-intensive IP services will soon necessitate the need to tap into this improved capacity. However, the lack of direct coordination between the macro and femto cells, and the completely distributed nature of femto cells make this an extremely challenging task. In this work, we address this challenge by providing efficient resource management solutions for OFDMA-based femto cells along with performance guarantees. In the process, we consider two models that tradeoff performance and overhead. We also propose a novel location-based resource management solution for leveraging maximal spatial reuse from femto cells. Our comprehensive evaluations indicate that in addition to providing improved coverage indoors, with carefully designed resource management solutions that leverage spatial reuse, femto cells have a great potential to increase the system performance by two folds.