Load Balancing in Two-Tier Cellular Networks With Open and Hybrid Access Femtocells

Abstract

Femtocell base station (BS) is a low-power, low-price BS based on cellular communication technology. It is expected to become a cost-effective solution for improving the communication performance of indoor users, whose traffic demands are large in general. There are mainly three access strategies for femtocell, i.e., closed access, open access and hybrid access strategies. While it has been generally known that open/hybrid access femtocells contribute more to enhancing the system-wide performance than closed access femtocells, the operating parameters of both macro and femtocells should be carefully chosen according to the mobile operator's policy, consumer's requirements, and so on. We propose long-term parameter optimization schemes, which maximize the average throughput of macrocell users while guaranteeing some degree of benefits to femtocell owners. To achieve this goal, we jointly optimize the ratio of dedicated resources for femtocells as well as the femtocell service area in open access femtocell networks through the numerical analysis. It is proved that the optimal parameter selection of open access femtocell is a convex optimization problem in typical environments. Then, we extend our algorithm to hybrid access femtocells where some intra-femtocell resources are dedicated only for femtocell owners while remaining resources are shared with foreign macrocell users. Our evaluation results show that the proposed parameter optimization schemes significantly enhance the performance of macrocell users thanks to the large offloading gain. The benefits provided to femtocell users are also adaptively maintained according to the femtocell users' requirements. The results in this paper provide insights about the situations where femtocell deployment on dedicated channels is preferred to the co-channel deployment.