A Review on 3GPP Femtocell Networks and its Technical Challenges

Background/Objective: The demand for the data traffic is exponentially increasing day to day because of the proliferation of smart phones, tablets and internet-connected devices. To meet this requirements network operators has to dramatically increase their network capacities. Methods: One of the possible ways to increase the system capacity is bringing the transmitter and receiver nearer to each other. It gives dual benefits higher quality and spectrum efficiency. Findings: The cost effective solution is installing the low power nodes instead of traditional high power macro base stations. Examples of these low power nodes are microcells, picocells, femtocells and distributed antenna systems. The network, which consists of different power nodes, architectures, and protocols is called Heterogeneous network. To overcome the indoor coverage and increased system capacity femtocells also called low power base stations are selected by the researchers as the suitable solution. In this paper we overview the femtocell deployment scenarios, access modes, and technical challenges briefly. Improvements: This paper gives the details about solutions available in the literature and gives future research directions to solve the technical challenges faced by femtocells.