438 research outputs found
Open vs Closed Access Femtocells in the Uplink
Femtocells are assuming an increasingly important role in the coverage and
capacity of cellular networks. In contrast to existing cellular systems,
femtocells are end-user deployed and controlled, randomly located, and rely on
third party backhaul (e.g. DSL or cable modem). Femtocells can be configured to
be either open access or closed access. Open access allows an arbitrary nearby
cellular user to use the femtocell, whereas closed access restricts the use of
the femtocell to users explicitly approved by the owner. Seemingly, the network
operator would prefer an open access deployment since this provides an
inexpensive way to expand their network capabilities, whereas the femtocell
owner would prefer closed access, in order to keep the femtocell's capacity and
backhaul to himself. We show mathematically and through simulations that the
reality is more complicated for both parties, and that the best approach
depends heavily on whether the multiple access scheme is orthogonal (TDMA or
OFDMA, per subband) or non-orthogonal (CDMA). In a TDMA/OFDMA network,
closed-access is typically preferable at high user densities, whereas in CDMA,
open access can provide gains of more than 200% for the home user by reducing
the near-far problem experienced by the femtocell. The results of this paper
suggest that the interests of the femtocell owner and the network operator are
more compatible than typically believed, and that CDMA femtocells should be
configured for open access whereas OFDMA or TDMA femtocells should adapt to the
cellular user density.Comment: 21 pages, 8 figures, 2 tables, submitted to IEEE Trans. on Wireless
Communication
Open, Closed, and Shared Access Femtocells in the Downlink
A fundamental choice in femtocell deployments is the set of users which are
allowed to access each femtocell. Closed access restricts the set to
specifically registered users, while open access allows any mobile subscriber
to use any femtocell. Which one is preferable depends strongly on the distance
between the macrocell base station (MBS) and femtocell. The main results of the
paper are lemmas which provide expressions for the SINR distribution for
various zones within a cell as a function of this MBS-femto distance. The
average sum throughput (or any other SINR-based metric) of home users and
cellular users under open and closed access can be readily determined from
these expressions. We show that unlike in the uplink, the interests of home and
cellular users are in conflict, with home users preferring closed access and
cellular users preferring open access. The conflict is most pronounced for
femtocells near the cell edge, when there are many cellular users and fewer
femtocells. To mitigate this conflict, we propose a middle way which we term
shared access in which femtocells allocate an adjustable number of time-slots
between home and cellular users such that a specified minimum rate for each can
be achieved. The optimal such sharing fraction is derived. Analysis shows that
shared access achieves at least the overall throughput of open access while
also satisfying rate requirements, while closed access fails for cellular users
and open access fails for the home user.Comment: 26 pages, 8 figures, Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Wireless
Communication
Spectrum Leasing as an Incentive towards Uplink Macrocell and Femtocell Cooperation
The concept of femtocell access points underlaying existing communication
infrastructure has recently emerged as a key technology that can significantly
improve the coverage and performance of next-generation wireless networks. In
this paper, we propose a framework for macrocell-femtocell cooperation under a
closed access policy, in which a femtocell user may act as a relay for
macrocell users. In return, each cooperative macrocell user grants the
femtocell user a fraction of its superframe. We formulate a coalitional game
with macrocell and femtocell users being the players, which can take individual
and distributed decisions on whether to cooperate or not, while maximizing a
utility function that captures the cooperative gains, in terms of throughput
and delay.We show that the network can selforganize into a partition composed
of disjoint coalitions which constitutes the recursive core of the game
representing a key solution concept for coalition formation games in partition
form. Simulation results show that the proposed coalition formation algorithm
yields significant gains in terms of average rate per macrocell user, reaching
up to 239%, relative to the non-cooperative case. Moreover, the proposed
approach shows an improvement in terms of femtocell users' rate of up to 21%
when compared to the traditional closed access policy.Comment: 29 pages, 11 figures, accepted at the IEEE JSAC on Femtocell Network
Outage Analysis of Uplink Two-tier Networks
Employing multi-tier networks is among the most promising approaches to
address the rapid growth of the data demand in cellular networks. In this
paper, we study a two-tier uplink cellular network consisting of femtocells and
a macrocell. Femto base stations, and femto and macro users are assumed to be
spatially deployed based on independent Poisson point processes. We consider an
open access assignment policy, where each macro user based on the ratio between
its distances from its nearest femto access point (FAP) and from the macro base
station (MBS) is assigned to either of them. By tuning the threshold, this
policy allows controlling the coverage areas of FAPs. For a fixed threshold,
femtocells coverage areas depend on their distances from the MBS; Those closest
to the fringes will have the largest coverage areas. Under this open-access
policy, ignoring the additive noise, we derive analytical upper and lower
bounds on the outage probabilities of femto users and macro users that are
subject to fading and path loss. We also study the effect of the distance from
the MBS on the outage probability experienced by the users of a femtocell. In
all cases, our simulation results comply with our analytical bounds
Multi-channel Hybrid Access Femtocells: A Stochastic Geometric Analysis
For two-tier networks consisting of macrocells and femtocells, the channel
access mechanism can be configured to be open access, closed access, or hybrid
access. Hybrid access arises as a compromise between open and closed access
mechanisms, in which a fraction of available spectrum resource is shared to
nonsubscribers while the remaining reserved for subscribers. This paper focuses
on a hybrid access mechanism for multi-channel femtocells which employ
orthogonal spectrum access schemes. Considering a randomized channel assignment
strategy, we analyze the performance in the downlink. Using stochastic geometry
as technical tools, we model the distribution of femtocells as Poisson point
process or Neyman-Scott cluster process and derive the distributions of
signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratios, and mean achievable rates, of both
nonsubscribers and subscribers. The established expressions are amenable to
numerical evaluation, and shed key insights into the performance tradeoff
between subscribers and nonsubscribers. The analytical results are corroborated
by numerical simulations.Comment: This is the final version, which was accepted in IEEE Transactions on
Communication
Modeling and Analysis of K-Tier Downlink Heterogeneous Cellular Networks
Cellular networks are in a major transition from a carefully planned set of
large tower-mounted base-stations (BSs) to an irregular deployment of
heterogeneous infrastructure elements that often additionally includes micro,
pico, and femtocells, as well as distributed antennas. In this paper, we
develop a tractable, flexible, and accurate model for a downlink heterogeneous
cellular network (HCN) consisting of K tiers of randomly located BSs, where
each tier may differ in terms of average transmit power, supported data rate
and BS density. Assuming a mobile user connects to the strongest candidate BS,
the resulting Signal-to-Interference-plus-Noise-Ratio (SINR) is greater than 1
when in coverage, Rayleigh fading, we derive an expression for the probability
of coverage (equivalently outage) over the entire network under both open and
closed access, which assumes a strikingly simple closed-form in the high SINR
regime and is accurate down to -4 dB even under weaker assumptions. For
external validation, we compare against an actual LTE network (for tier 1) with
the other K-1 tiers being modeled as independent Poisson Point Processes. In
this case as well, our model is accurate to within 1-2 dB. We also derive the
average rate achieved by a randomly located mobile and the average load on each
tier of BSs. One interesting observation for interference-limited open access
networks is that at a given SINR, adding more tiers and/or BSs neither
increases nor decreases the probability of coverage or outage when all the
tiers have the same target-SINR.Comment: IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, vol. 30, no. 3, pp.
550 - 560, Apr. 201
Adaptive Power Control Applying to Femtocell
Femtocells are expected to increase network capacity, extend macrocell coverage, and introduce new services. Because Femtocells share the same frequency band with macrocells in many cases, the femtocell base station (BS) must mitigate the interference with macrocells as well as ensure coverage in customer premises. However, conventional femtocell BS transmit power setting have not adequately accounted for the interference with neighbouring macrocell mobile stations (MSs), leading to small femtocell user throughout. In the paper, we describe an adaptive power level setting scheme i.e. Distributed Power Control algorithm to mitigate the interference of MSs in the basis of the received power levels. In DPC, each pair of transmitter (e.g., an MS) and receiver (e.g., the BS) does not need to know the transmit power or channel quality of any other pair. At each time slot, all it needs to know is the actual SIR it currently achieves at the receiver. Then, by taking the ratio between the fixed, target SIR and the variable, actual SIR value measured for this time slot and multiplying the current transmit power by that ratio, we get the transmit power for the next time slot. This update happens simultaneously at each pair of transmitter and receiver. This is how DPC provides adaptive nature to Femtocell
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Self-organising network management for heterogeneous LTE-advanced networks
This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University LondonSince 2004, when the Long Term Evolution (LTE) was first proposed to be publicly available in the year 2009, a plethora of new characteristics, techniques and applications have been constantly enhancing it since its first release, over the past decade. As a result, the research aims for LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) have been released to create a ubiquitous and supportive network for mobile users. The incorporation of heterogeneous networks (HetNets) has been proposed as one of the main enhancements of LTE-A systems over the existing LTE releases, by proposing the deployment of small-cell applications, such as femtocells, to provide more coverage and quality of service (QoS) within the network, whilst also reducing capital expenditure. These principal advantages can be obtained at the cost of new challenges such as inter-cell interference, which occurs when different network applications share the same frequency channel in the network. In this thesis, the main challenges of HetNets in LTE-A platform have been addressed and novel solutions are proposed by using self-organising network (SON) management approaches, which allows the cooperative cellular systems to observe, decide and amend their ongoing operation based on network conditions. The novel SON algorithms are modelled and simulated in OPNET modeler simulation software for the three processes of resource allocation, mobility management and interference coordination in multi-tier macro-femto networks. Different channel allocation methods based on cooperative transmission, frequency reuse and dynamic spectrum access are investigated and a novel SON sub-channel allocation method is proposed based on hybrid fractional frequency reuse (HFFR) scheme to provide dynamic resource allocation between macrocells and femtocells, while avoiding co-tier and cross-tier interference. Mobility management is also addressed as another important issue in HetNets, especially in hand-ins from macrocell to femtocell base stations. The existing research considers a limited number of methods for handover optimisation, such as signal strength and call admission control (CAC) to avoid unnecessary handovers, while our novel SON handover management method implements a comprehensive algorithm that performs sensing process, as well as resource availability and user residence checks to initiate the handover process at the optimal time. In addition to this, the novel femto over macro priority (FoMP) check in this process also gives the femtocell target nodes priority over the congested macrocells in order to improve the QoS at both the network tiers. Inter-cell interference, as the key challenge of HetNets, is also investigated by research on the existing time-domain, frequency-domain and power control methods. A novel SON interference mitigation algorithm is proposed, which is based on enhanced inter-cell interference coordination (eICIC) with power control process. The 3-phase power control algorithm contains signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) measurements, channel quality indicator (CQI) mapping and transmission power amendments to avoid the occurrence of interference due to the effects of high transmission power. The results of this research confirm that if heterogeneous systems are backed-up with SON management strategies, not only can improve the network capacity and QoS, but also the new network challenges such as inter-cell interference can also be mitigated in new releases of LTE-A network
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