Performance improvement in WiMAX networks with femtocells

A Femtocell is a small cellular base station, typically designed for use in a home or small business. It connects to the service provider's network via broadband (such as DSL or cable) current designs typically support 2 to 4 active mobile phones in a residential setting, and 8 to 16 active mobile phones in enterprise settings. In this paper, we focus on how received signal quality can be improved by deploying femtocell base stations in a WiMAX system. We propose a femtocell model to analyse the potential improvement on the CINR (carrier to interference plus noise ratio) when using different channel assignment schemes and different deployment densities of femtocell base stations within a macrocell. The simulation results show that we can enhance CINR by deploying large number of femtocell base stations within macrocells, and the Least-Interfered-First (LIF) scheme we used can significantly reduce the co-channel interference induced by neighbouring femtocell base stations.