Coverage Analysis of WCDMA-based Femto Cells for Data Offloading

Recently, solutions to accommodate explosively growing mobile data traffic have attracted intensive attentions since the emergence of high-performance smartphones. Spectrum which can be exploited for mobile communications is very limited. Thus, femto cell is considered as an alternative because it can efficiently offload mobile data traffic from macro cells without using additional spectrum. In this paper, we mathematically analyzed the coverage of femto cell when it is deployed in an area where there exists signals from existing macro base stations. Our numerical results indicate that the coverage of femto cell increases as the total power of femto cell increases or the ratio of power allocated to pilot channel increases. However, it is also shown that the coverage of femto cell is very limited despite its high power when interference signals from macro base stations are strong.