Green Femtocells in the IoT Era: Traffic Modeling and Challenges -- An Overview

Abstract

The rapid increase in numbers of communicating devices, such as smartphones, PDAs, and notebooks, is causing the demand for mobile data traffic to grow significantly. In recent years, mobile operators have been trying to find solutions to increase the network capacity in order to satisfy mobile users' requests and meet the requirements in terms of various quality of service measures in the case of high mobile data traffic. With ever increasing demand from mobile users and implementations in the area of IoT, femtocells have proved to be a promising solution for network operators to enhance coverage and capacity, and they provide high data rate services in a less expensive manner. This article describes possible femtocell applications and traffic modeling approaches in the IoT environment, and highlights potentials and challenges for IoT-femtocell-based applications.