Effect of Environmental Factors on System Capacity and Coverage of Femtocell Networks

Hoon KIM

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Communications   Vol.E96-B    No.1    pp.201-207
Publication Date: 2013/01/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1345
DOI: 10.1587/transcom.E96.B.201
Print ISSN: 0916-8516
Type of Manuscript: PAPER
Category: Wireless Communication Technologies
Keyword: 
femtocell,  propagation model,  capacity,  coverage,  network planning,  

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Summary: 
Recently much attention is being devoted to a femtocell's potential for improving indoor cellular coverage with the provision of high data rate services in a wireless environment. Femtocells are usually deployed in homes and buildings and overlay existing macrocells, or microcells which cover wider service areas. In such an overlaid network structure, one of the important issues in network planning is the analysis of system capacity achievable by femtocells, which could be significantly affected by indoor radio propagation properties. This paper addresses a typical environmental scenario where a detailed indoor radio propagation model can be adopted. Moreover, a performance evaluation of embedded femteocell networks reflecting various environmental scenarios and factors is provided by the metrics of outage probability, dynamic range of spectral efficiency, and required separation distances for various wall structures, distance, and the number of walls between the home femtocell and the user. Our computer simulation and numerical analysis indicate an outage probability of 1%∼58%, dynamic range of spectral varies from around 2.2 to 7, while the required separation from the macrocell station is 25 m ∼ 327 m. This information could be useful for femtocell network planning.