Improve indoor coverage by femtocells

Abstract

As cellular phone plays a more and more important role in our life, the demand for increased user and system throughput is growing. In the past decades, such issue could be solved by higher bandwidth allocation, but since bandwidth is scarce and expensive nowadays, the concept of femtocell is proposed.

As a promising technology, femtocell is a low power, low cost and shot-range base station deployed by end user to supplement indoor coverage of macrocell and provide high data rate. With intelligent frequency assignment, femtocell can offload indoor users from macrocell, and potentially enhance the capacity both indoors and outdoors.

Normally, femtocell is assigned same frequency band with macrocell, but the co-channel assignment may cause severe macro- to femto- interference and vice versa. Therefore in this project, a new frequency allocation method is proposed based on existing methods, hybrid frequency assignment method and resource partitioning method. By doing so, subsequent simulation results show a remarkable improvement of indoor capacity for both femto-mobile stations and macro-mobile stations.