Analysis of macro user offloading to femto cells for 5G cellular networks

Abstract

The overwhelming proportion of cellular data communication originates from the indoor usage of smart phones, tablets and other such devices. To facilitate higher bandwidth, future systems are transitioning to higher frequencies (> 2 GHz). However, there is a high penetration loss due to walls etc., when outdoor base stations communicate with indoor devices. To overcome this issue, the use of indoor femtocell base stations has emerged as a popular solution. This work aims to analyze the impact of offloading outdoor users to small cells. The outdoor users are initially served by macro network i.e. network consisting of outdoor base stations only (macrocell base station or eNodeB) and are then progressively handed over to femtocell base stations and small Densification is done by installing femtocell base stations within the coverage of eNodeB, this densification is one of the key enabling technology for future 5G cellular networks. We analyze the network performance in terms of the overall capacity gain, peak user equipment (UE) throughput, macro cell edge throughput and overall coverage enhancement. The offloading results in significant improvement in all of these aspects at the cost of additional network deployment cost.