Hybrid user access control in HSDPA femtocells

In this paper, we develop a simulation tool to study the performance of hybrid femtocell access in a High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) network. A hybrid resource allocation scheduler is developed in order to balance the tradeoff between open and closed femto access strategies. Performance in terms of macrocell traffic offloading is investigated under the dynamic configuration of a network scheduling parameter K. Based on the scheduler, we illustrate a state transition procedure between different femtocell access modes (sleep, open, closed and hybrid) and study the advantage of implementing the hybrid access mechanism in a 3G cellular network. Our analyses lay the foundation of future study on autonomous resource allocation in femtocells based on network traffic recognition and smart access management.