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