Detecting the presence of a proximate cellular user through distributed femtocell sensing

This article examines a femtocell-based scheme as a prospective means to enhance the performance of current cellular systems. In the adopted framework, femtocells are tasked with connecting local devices to the network of a mobile operator without creating undue interference to cellular users. The access point of a femtocell only possesses limited information about its parent cellular infrastructure. For instance, it may not know individual channel gains, user locations or frequency allocations. A paradigm where local devices are employed as acquisition sensors in a distributed inference problem is considered. The added knowledge captured through the use of mobile devices combined with the agility of reconfigurable antenna systems lead to significant performance gains when compared to the operation that results from deploying oblivious femtocells. Experimental results are provided to support this study and its conclusions.