A comparison model for the Wireless Local Area Network technologies: 802.11n and HeNB in LTE networks

Most of connections in indoor environments can be with high data rate due to local area characteristics, so the technologies for Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN) will become increasingly important in the future in terms of frequency reuse. Home evolved Node B (HeNB), known as Femtocell Access Point (FAP) and 802.11n WLAN belonging to WLAN are promising technologies to tackle these issues. Femtocells, however, use the IP Network as backhaul architecture instead of the conventional cellular network infrastructure. Thus, femtocell and Wi-Fi infrastructure networks have a lot in common. This raises a curiosity whether femtocell technology would replace existing Wi-Fi technology. This can be answered only by carefully analyzing the similarities and differences between the two technologies. In this article, the comparison and analysis between these two technologies based on PHY data rate and MAC layer throughput is essential to answer this question. The contributions of this article mainly fall on establishing throughput estimation and comparison for HeNB and 802.11n not much addressed in other works. Our main contribution falls on that the maximal throughput of 802.11n in MAC occurs when the number of active UEs is 4 instead of one. The model developed in this article can also be used to estimate the performance of HeNB for LTE-Advanced and the future 802.11ac and 802.11ad.