Voice call capacity analysis of long range WiFi as a femto backhaul solution

Abstract

In many rural and developing countries, the high cost of deploying and operating traditional telecommunications equipment mean that there are many areas that lack basic telecommunications infrastructure; this is further exacerbated by the low returns on investment that can be achieved. However, the increasing availability of low-cost femtocell equipment presents a potential solution.This paper investigates the feasibility of using long range WiFi as a backhauling solution for femtocell network deployments. Specifically, the number of high quality circuit switched AMR voice and packet switched AMR VoIP calls that can be supported via femtocells using long range WiFi backhauling is analysed. An adapted variant of the E-Model, which supports the AMR codec, is used to assess the end-to-end voice quality that would be achieved. In order to validate the obtained results both an analytical model and an NS-3 simulation based capacity analysis are presented, with both sets of results showing a high degree of correlation. The results show that a relatively large number of simultaneous AMR voice calls can be supported. This demonstrates the feasibility of using WiFi as a backhauling solution to deploy low-cost femtocell networks in areas were previously it has not been economically viable.