Performance Analysis Of Femtocell in an Indoor Cellular Network

This paper investigates the use of femtocell as a solution to improve indoor coverage and off-load mobile data indoors on the macro cellular networks. Specifically, the article deals with a performance analysis of femtocell in an indoor cellular network. This is achieved by designing and modelling femto-cell network in an indoor cellular network using OPNET modelling and simulation software. The user satisfaction criteria for the various traffic types including voice, video conferencing, email, web and file transfer protocol traffic were defined and simulated. The modelled femto-cell network and traffic types were simulated with each simulation instance carried out with ten different seeds in OPNET version 14.5 and average values recorded. The performance metrics of the femtocell were obtained by measuring the Quality of Service, Mean Opinion Score, delay and the throughput of these user traffic types and also the throughput of femtocell node in the indoor network. These performance metrics were discussed and compared to the macro cellular networks. The results demonstrate that femtocell assures improved indoor coverage, provides better network capacity than the 3G macro cellular networks. This research reaffirms that Femtocell is able to support the high demand of mobile data indoors, off-load traffic from the macro cellular networks and also provide solutions to coverage issues experienced when using macro cellular network for indoor communications. Keywords-Femtocell, Indoor communications, OPNET simulation, Delay, Throughput.