Neighborhood Femtocells Indoors to Outdoors

In this network model, femtocells are deployed by users in a “few” indoor venues in an ad hoc fashion, creating substantial capacity gains and traffic offload benefits for operators while enhancing indoor and outdoor coverage for all wireless users across the entire neighborhood.

Studies show that this new neighborhood femtocell network, in a dedicated spectrum, provides an increase of 5x to 20x in overall system capacity for 3G and even higher for 4G & beyond compared to a traditional macro deployment in the same amount of spectrum. The extent of capacity gain depends 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. Just as important, 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 aforementioned 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 adjusts 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.