LTE Communications and Networks

12The Road Ahead for LTE Femtocells

Masood Ur Rehman and Ghazanfar Ali Safdar

School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, University of Bedfordshire, Luton, UK

In July 2015, more than 6.2 billion subscribers that made up of 85% of the world’s 7.3 billion population were using GSM‐HSPA [1]. Cellular data revenues were estimated at $132 billion in 2015 alone in the US. The global mobile market is expected to include nearly 8.45 billion subscribers by 2019. An estimated 8.1 billion users representing about 97% of the market share would use 3GPP technologies [2]. LTE has become a global wireless foundation supporting continual enhancements. Competition in the mobile broadband market due to persistent growth in the demand for capacity has made LTE the favoured 4G solution because of its high data throughput, low latency and high spectral efficiency. Because of this, LTE has experienced faster deployment than any mobile technology ever and continues to see an increased demand.

Femtocells provide the solution to poor indoor coverage in cellular communication that has hugely attracted network operators and stakeholders. Femtocells are low powered, low cost and subscriber controlled units that provide a dedicated BS to indoor subscribers. Femtocell units, known as Femtocell Access Points (FAPs), connect standard mobile devices also known as Femtocell User Equipment (FUE) to the network of a mobile operator through residential Digital Subscriber Line (DSL), optical fibres, ...