Interference reduction through femto-relays

Abstract

Femtocell, also known as home base station is one of the promising cost-effective technologies that ensure a steady increase in system capacity, improvement in service quality and a better data rate for users mainly in the indoor environment. However massive rollout of femtocells cause severe interference to the existing macrocell network and drive users into outage. Moreover, though femtocells can provide improved home coverage and capacity for indoor users, many a times, these femtocells are under-utilised when they do not serve any voice or data request. In this paper a novel idea to extend the coverage of femtocells beyond the home environment through multiple hops is proposed. The idea is to exploit the under-utilised femtocells to serve the high data rate requests of many outdoor user equipments and reduce the probability of their outage. This will not only extend the coverage of femtocell and relax the burden on the macrocell base station, but also helps in reducing the interference to the co-existing macrocell network, because of reduced transmission power and path loss, achieved through relaying.