Performance analysis of two-tier femtocell networks in Nakagami-m fading channels

Abstract

Driven by the proliferation of fast developing wireless user equipments, the wireless data traffic is exponentially growing in recent years, especially for indoor and hotspot scenarios. Two-tier femtocell network, comprising a conventional macrocell network with femtocell access points (FAPs), is an effective and economical solution to achieve high network capacity and coverage. However, the downlink network performance is severely impacted by intra-tier and inter-tier interference, and it is of great interest to characterize the effect of such interference to the transmission reliability. By using stochastic geometric tools, a two-tier femtocell network is taken into account in this paper, where the desired signal and interference signal experience Nakagami-m fading. The performances of both tiers are evaluated in terms of success probability. Closed-form results are derived for the femto tier in general cases and for the macro tier in a plausible special case. Monte Carlo simulations are performed to testify our analytical results and analyze the impacts of factor m and path loss exponent on the network performance.