Realistic Indoor Wi-Fi and Femto deployment Study as the Offloading Solutions to LTE Macro Network

This paper investigates the downlink performance of indoor deployed Wi-Fi and Femto as the offloading solution to the LTE macro cellular networks in a real large-scale dense-urban scenario. With an assumed traffic volume of 50x compared to today’s levels, it is estimated that the LTE dual-carrier macro network will suffer high network outage which is defined as proportion of outage users. A user is considered to be in outage if they have a user throughput less than 1 Mbps. We evaluate the performance of indoor Wi-Fi and Femto cell deployment to offload the congested LTE macro network. We show that, in a dual-carrier LTE macro case, Wi-Fi access point density of 230/km2 is required to meet the Key Performance Indicator (KPI) - less than 10% of users have a throughput below 1 Mbps whereas out-band Femto access point density of 1200/km2 is required. Furthermore, we show that in-band Femto cell cannot meet the network KPI even at a very high access point density. We also show that Wi-Fi and Femto cell offload the same amount of traffic when they are deployed at the same access point density.