The Gain of Targeted Introduction of Femtocells into a LTE Macro Network

Previous studies have indicated that the drawback of a heterogeneous network deployment is that the required number of new sites to fulfill a desired coverage and capacity requirement becomes considerably larger compared to a densified macro deployment. Therefore, the scope of this study is to investigate if a more targeted introduction of femtocells, under the assumption of a non-uniform user traffic, could help to reduce the required number of new femto sites. The enhanced femto deployments evaluated in this paper are aiming to offload initially the users with the worst macro coverage and/or the users generating most of the traffic. The obtained results show that an approach, which deploys femto eNodeBs initially within the traffic-heavy apartments provides considerable gains compared to a random deployment, or a deployment looking only at the macro cell coverage. The best results are achieved, when the approach based on the user traffic is combined with the coverage-based approach.