Technoeconomical Analysis of Macrocell and Femtocell Based HetNet under Different Deployment Constraints

Abstract

Ultradense deployment of small cells is being considered as one of the key flavors of the emerging 5G cellular networks to address the future data capacity challenges. A large share of these deployments will be indoor, as this is the arena where the majority of the data traffic is believed to originate from in the future. Indoor small cell solutions (e.g., femtocell or WiFi) are well positioned for delivering superior indoor coverage and capacity. However, due to relatively smaller coverage footprint compared to traditional macrocells, a very dense deployment of small cells will be needed in order to have a ubiquitous indoor coverage. Such dense deployment triggers cost and energy efficiency concerns for mobile operators. In this paper, we analyze and compare the technoeconomic performance of two deployment strategies: homogeneous macrocellular densification and heterogeneous macro-femto deployment strategy, from an indoor service provisioning perspective. Particularly, we analyze and contrast the performance of macro-femto based deployment, with varying femtocell market penetration rate and under different femtocell backhaul connectivity constraints, with that of homogeneous macrocellular densification. The results indicate superior performance of indoor femtocell based deployment as compared to macrocellular-only densification, due to better indoor coverage, radio channel conditions, and high degree of spatial reuse.