IEEE International Workshop on Femtocell Networks (FEMnet) 2011

Femtocells, which are low-powered cellular access points deployed in residential homes and offices, are one solution to the problem of enhancing indoor coverage and improving area spectral efficiency in cellular systems by reducing the distance between transmitters and receivers and alleviating the traffic burden on the macrocell base stations. In this way, femtocell networks can potentially improve spatial reuse. Femtocells may also reduce deployment costs and provide energy savings. This new networking topology, however, also comes with its own challenges. There are significant technical problems that need to be addressed for the successful deployment and operation of femtocells. In particular, due to lack of coordination with the rest of the network, interference management is a fundamental issue. By exploiting ideas from traditional multi-cell power control, cognitive radio and dynamic spectrum access, femtocell base stations can be designed to react, based on their interference conditions, by adapting their signaling strategy or opportunistically accessing shared radio resources. Recent advances in the understanding of interference channels, cooperative games and distributed optimization theory could also be useful for novel designs of future femtocells. Finally, research on femtocell networks could benefit from backhaul coordinated multi-point transmission schemes wherein multiple base stations steer their beams through array processing to minimize interference.