High Capacity Femtocells with Directional Antennas

Femtocells are low-power, low-cost and user-deployed home base stations that can improve poor indoor coverage and enhance system capacity. However, as femtocells are deployed extensively, the two-tier interference will become serious, including the interference from macrocells and that from femtocells. Thanks to the low side lobe, the E-plane horns based reconfigurable antenna can be used to reduce the interference and enhance the capacity. In this paper, we investigate the effects of applying E-plane horns based reconfigurable directional antenna on link reliability and capacity of the orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) based femtocell systems. We compare our newly designed E-plane horns based reconfigurable antenna,and the sector antenna provided in the IEEE 802.16m, as well the omni-directional antenna. It is shown that E-plane horns based reconfigurable antenna system has higher femtocell capacity than the IEEE 802.16m sector antenna system due to the advantages of low side lobe and high main-lobe gain.