Femtocell interference analysis based on the development of system-level LTE simulator

Although femtocell can confer various benefits to both operators and users, many technical issues, such as interference coordination, network synchronization, self-configuration, and self-optimization must be considered to effectively deploy femtocells in real environments. In this article, we develop a system-level simulator in order to evaluate performance of long-term evolution (LTE)-femtocell systems. The simulator consists of five functional modules which realize packet scheduling and call admission control functionalities and model various wireless channel effects, real and non-real time traffics, and user mobility. These modules are managed by operational modules that follow event-driven programming. In addition, the simulator adopts a graphical user interface (GUI) that facilitates configuration, management, and observation of simulations in real time. Based on the simulator, we analyze effects of signal interference between macro- and femtocells under four scenarios. From the results, we confirm that the developed LTE-femtocell simulator can effectively support performance evaluation and analysis on various femtocell deployment scenarios.