Cell Selection Modes in LTE Macro–Femtocell Deployment

It is expected that femtocells will extend indoor coverage and enhance network capacity. Femtocells will also help to manage the exponential growth of traffic within macrocells, due to the handover of the indoor traffic to the backhaul connection. To achieve these benefits interference management between macrocells and femtocells is essential. Alongside radio resource control and power control, cell selection is one possibility for managing this interference. Enabling a macro user that strongly suffers from interference from a nearby HeNB or permitting a femto user to connect to an eNB due to better channel conditions will reduce cross‐trier interference. In this chapter access control mechanisms based on the 3GPP‐standard are introduced in order to discuss different cell selection scenarios and to demonstrate their performance within system level simulations.