A case study on femtocell access modes

Access mode of a femtocell network plays a crucial role in determining the service quality of femtousers and the revenue of network operators. The behavior of a femtocell is not only based on network density, orthogonal or non-orthogonal multi-access technique, frequency reuse strategy, but also on the access mode being adopted. The access mode selection directly influences the performance metrics like handover mechanism, security, resource management and co-channel interference management. In this paper, we analyze the behavior of femtocell networks in three different access modes. We examine the choice of access mode from the aspect of network operator and FC owner. Under various network scenarios, we identify the best access mode analytically in terms of ergodic rate, sum throughput and interference factor. Simulation results indicate that the performance of conventional cellular network can be improvised through proper selection of FC access mode. It indicates that the selection of a particular access mode strictly depends on the performance requirements of network operator and FC owner.