How femtocells impact the capacity and the energy efficiency of LTE-Advanced networks

International audienceIn this paper, we show the impact of femtocells deployment on the capacity of LTE-Advanced networks. We analyze the Erlang-like capacity of a network composed of macro networks only and study the impact of introducing femtocells. We study the ability of open and closed access femtocells to offload traffic from the macro network and draw the capacity gains that are expected from this offload. Knowing that femtocells are not managed by the operator, but installed by clients, we take into account the random nature of the resulting deployment in the capacity analysis. Our results quantify the gains thus achieved, in terms of user QoS and cell load, as well as energy efficiency, as compared to a pure macro networ