Emerging trends in small-cell technology

In the emerging growth of wireless cellular technology, the indoor coverage has always been an important issue in cellular networks. Previously the indoor coverage was provided by outdoor antennas only, to increase the coverage and capacity of indoor environment, it's very costly to add extra outdoor cells (Macrocells) and it also create more problems with the interference; as more cell overlap each other. To overcome this problem of increasing the capacity and coverage area of indoor environment, small cell technology is introduced. The emerging small cell technology is low power and low-cost, Hence user and operator can deploy base station or radio access point at very low cost that operate in licensed and unlicensed spectrum to complement macro cell. This paper focused on different types of small cells(metrocell, microcell, picocell and femtocell) employed in indoor environment to provides improved capacity, cellular coverage in Homes/Enterprises/Metropolitan and small rural areas. The small cell technology plays a vital role in offloading the existing cellular (3G, 4G) network load to manage the spectrum more efficiently. This paper also focused on heterogeneous small cell network.