Improving Macrocell Downlink Throughput in Rayleigh Fading Channel Environment Through Femtocell User Cooperation

Abstract

This paper studies cooperative techniques that rely on femtocell user diversity to improve the downlink communication quality of macrocell users. We analytically derive and evaluate the achievable performance of these techniques in the downlink of Rayleigh fading channels. We provide an approximation of both the bit-error rate (BER) and the data throughput that macrocell users receive with femtocell user cooperation. Using simulations, we show that under reasonable SNR values, cooperative schemes enhance the performances of macrocells by improving the BER, outage probability, and data throughput of macrocell users significantly when compared with the traditional, non-cooperative schemes.