System Capacity and Coverage Analysis of Femtocell Networks

Recently much attention has been devoted to the potential of femtocell to improve indoor cellular coverage and high speed wireless communications. Femtocell networks use home base station and existing digital subscriber line (DSL) or other cable line as backhaul connectivity constructing a hierarchical cell structure (HCS) networks operating with macrocells which cover wider service areas. This paper investigates the effect of interference on system performances of femtocell embedded HCS networks adopting detailed radio propagation models while most of works evaluate system performance using simple radio propagation models. Considering various environmental factors such as wall structure, number of walls, and distance between femtocell and users, this paper evaluates not only the overall outage probability and the dynamic range of spectral efficiency achieved by overall femtocells in HCS networks, but also separation distances from macrocell required to femtocell for provision of the minimum required spectral efficiency. Our evaluation includes outage probability of 2~40%, spectral efficiency dynamics of around 250%, 50~200m of required separation from macrocell with various wall structures, which could be useful for femtocell embedded HCS network planning.