An energy efficient cell selection scheme for femtocell network with spreading

Use of femtocells for indoor and office environment has proved to be an effective solution to handle ever increasing mobile data demands. Femtocell helps improving network capacity in an energy efficient manner without significantly burdening the operator with huge capital and operational expenditure. Since extremely dense femtocell deployments are expected in near future, it is of interest to look into their energy efficiency measures. In this paper, we analyse the energy efficiency aspect of cell selection scheme for femtocell networks. Cell selection scheme defines the criteria on which mobile users associate themselves with base stations. Hence, it plays a crucial role in system load balancing and total energy consumption. We suggest a unique cell selection scheme that assigns mobile users to femtocell base stations considering the capacity improvement obtained per unit increase in transmit power. Our proposed scheme shows an improvement in network performance in terms of both system capacity and energy efficiency. Additionally, we suggest the use of power spreading over subchannels to keep overall interference minimum while maximizing spectrum utilization.