Performance considerations of LTE-A femtocell networks under different load variations

Femtocells are viewed as a promising option for the next generation wireless communication networks, to meet the rising expectation by users in terms of data rates and quality of services. Femtocells are small, inexpensive and low power base stations that are generally consumer deployed, and are expected to significantly enhance the coverage and capacity of indoor users. However femtocells are installed in an ad-hoc manner without proper planning by the network operator. This increases the technical challenges for load balancing and efficient utilization of available resources. In this paper we study the effect of load variations among femtocells on the system performance. We focus on a typical urban dense area with a 5×5-cellular grid representation. Our results show that without any load balancing technique, system performance is significantly degraded in terms of the number of blocked calls and the SINR received by the users.