Analytical Evaluation of Coverage-Oriented Femtocell Network Deployment

TL;DR

This paper introduces a coverage-oriented femtocell deployment scheme that selectively activates femtocells based on macrocell coverage, leading to improved overall coverage with fewer active femtocells.

Contribution

It proposes a novel femtocell activation scheme based on macrocell proximity and provides an analytical framework to evaluate its coverage performance.

Findings

The scheme improves coverage probability despite lower femtocell density.

Active femtocells are optimally located in poor macrocell coverage areas.

Analytical results identify the optimal deployment parameters.

Abstract

This paper proposes a coverage-oriented femtocell network deployment scheme, in which the femtocell base stations (BSs) can decide whether to be active or inactive depending on their distances from the macrocell BSs. Specifically, as the areas close to the macrocell BSs already have satisfactory cellular coverage, the femtocell BSs located inside such areas are kept to be inactive. Thus, all the active femtocells are located in the poor macrocell coverage areas. Based on a stochastic geometric framework, the coverage probability can be analyzed with tractable results. Surprisingly, the results show that the proposed scheme, although with a lower defacto femtocell density, can achieve better coverage performance than that keeping all femtocells in the entire network to be active. The analytical results further identify the achievable optimal performance of the new scheme, which provides mobile operators a guideline for femtocell deployment and operation.