Increasing Femto Cell Throughput with HSDPA Using Higher Order Modulation

In femto base station concept homes and small offices can be equipped with very low transmission power base stations to offer users high signal to interference and noise ratios (SINR) due to the close proximity of the base station unit. In the first release of high speed downlink packet access (HSDPA) specification the highest supported modulation scheme, 16 quadrature amplitude modulation (16QAM), might not be efficient enough to fully exploit the superior signal quality offered by the femto base stations making the use of a higher order modulation desirable. This paper presents a performance evaluation of using higher order modulation scheme, namely 64QAM, with HSDPA in a combined single frequency macro and femto cell scenario with advanced receivers used at mobile terminals. The impact of femto cells and 64QAM is also analyzed as a function of indoor user penetration. The analysis is done using dynamic system level simulations.