Femtocell Technology: A Viable Indoor Coverage Solution

Abstract

It has been generally observed that cell phone users in most developing countries possess more than one phone largely due to poor quality of service (QoS). This is becoming intolerable for indoor mobile phone users who account for the greater population of patronage compared to outdoor users, especially in Africa. This growing population have increased exponentially requiring high data rates due to user migration from voice centred communications to data centred communications for non-real and real time applications like email/text messaging and live streaming events. As a result, most existing network Infrastructures are strained of their resources (bandwidth and frequency/time slot) to meet users perceived QoS. Capacity expansion through cell size reduction accounts for the greater improvement besides the combined contributions of wider spectrum, spectrum splitting and modulation techniques. Femtocell technology provides the road map to achieving an all Internet Protocol (IP) based network which is the future of mobile communication. Therefore, in this paper an overview of Femtocell as a viable solution to the stated challenges is presented. An outline of its choice with respect to energy consumption, some of its deployment challenges including interference management, timing and synchronization, mobility management, and QoS over internet backhaul are presented. These challenges are seen to vary based on the Channel type deployment and access method used.