Power Spectral Density and Spectral Efficiency Analysis in Line-of-Sight 2.6 GHz Beamforming Femtocell Networks

Cellular communication networks require innovative ways in the future to provide sufficient resources for the increasing communication and data rate demands. Increasing the frequency is one of the solutions that can solve for these challenges. However, concerns of excessive losses that high frequency signals experience, and the interference that result due to increasing the transmission power were raised. Femtocells which are small base stations of 10-20 meters, may also be able to cater high data rates and spectral efficiency because of the close proximity between the user and the femtocell base station (FBS) if interference is carefully mitigated. Through simulation, this paper studies the effects of increasing and decreasing the femtocell transmission power on the network performance in order to introduce a beamforming scheme that is able to enhance the signal strength as well as the spectral efficiency rates in line-of-sight environments for 2.6 GHz frequency bands without increasing the transmission power. Using a 4 element antenna, the beamwidth is narrowed down and directed towards the desired users in location aware scenarios to enhance the transmission directivity and signal strength at the same time. The results show that users can get up to 2.5 bps/Hz spectral efficiency by the proposed scheme in service area were 30 femtocells are deployed.