Neighborhood Femtocells Indoors to Outdoors

Studies show that this new neighborhood femtocell network in a dedicated spectrum provides an increase of 5x to 20x in overall system capacity compared to a traditional macro deployment in the same amount of spectrum. The extent of capacity gains depend on the femtocells’ penetration and other factors including the morphology of deployment.

Due to the ease of deployment and the fact that customer backhaul and site premises can be leveraged, this new open access neighborhood femtocell network offers tremendous economic benefits in reduced CapEx and OpEx. Importantly, this new neighborhood femtocell network model uses standardized femtocell architecture adopted by the industry and thus ensures full compatibility with legacy networks and mobiles.

To enable this new deployment and provide the above mentioned benefits, femtocells need to be equipped with enhanced algorithms to provide the following:

1. Seamless mobility within the femtocell network and femto-to-macro network with no interruption or degradation of service and user experience.
2. Self configuration enabling each femtocell to autonomously learn the RF environment. This is achieved by setting operational parameters for Primary Scrambling Code (PSC), femtocell transmit power and handover by using network listen measurements as well as mobile reports.
3. Self healing capability where each femtocell continuously monitors changes in the network topology and adjust operational parameters to ensure maximum capacity gains with a seamless user experience. Changes occur in network topology due to newly added, removed or relocated femtocells.