Study on the effects of backhual solutions on indoor mobile deployment „macrocell vs. femtocell”

Abstract

The deployment of low cost and low power base stations has been recognized in recent years as a promising cost-efficient solution and energy-efficient strategy. In this paper the femtocell and macrocell deployment options have been compared in the context of indoor mobile broadband deployment, with focus on the effect of different backhauling solutions in power consumption and the total deployment cost. This study has been based on the deployment of mobile broadband services within an area of one square kilometers in a new densely populated business district where the different user demands, spectrum bandwidths, backhaul technologies and radio access technologies are taken into account. Moreover, various deployment scenarios reflecting the business perspectives of mobile operators have been looked into as well. The main findings reached indicate that backhaul solutions contribute differently to cost and power consumption depending on the employed deployment strategy. However, contributions to the total power consumption and to the CapEx and OpEx elements of the total deployment cost elements turned to be more significant in the case of femtocell deployment scenarios than in the case of macrocell ones. It is worthy of notice that the femtocell deployment is more cost-efficient, especially in high demand situation when new macro sites are needed to be deployed.