Femtocell/Macrocell Interference Analysis for Mobile WiMAX System

Yu-Suk Sung , Nam-Ryul Jeon , Byung-Wan Yoon , Jong-Sik Lee , Seong-Choon Lee and Seong-Cheol Kim
Institute

of New Media and Communications, Seoul National University 599 Gwanangno, Gwanak-gu, Seoul, 151-742, Korea Tel : +82-2-880-8481, Fax : +82-2-888-3633 E-mail : {sfamily, jeon3115, sckim}@maxwell.snu.ac.kr Mobile Internet Development Department of KT Infra Laboratory 17 Woomyeon-dong, Seocho-gu, Seoul 137-792, Korea Tel : +82-2-526-6243, Fax : +82-2-526-5200 E-mail: {yoonbw, lowe, lsc}@kt.com interference control, and so on. But most of these are open issues still. In order to deploy and operate femtocell networks appropriately, all of the above mentioned issues should be considered [2, 5]. In this paper, we focus on the RF interference problem only. We discuss the effect of interference between femtocell and macrocell for the OFDMA/TDD based Mobile WiMAX system by system level simulation (SLS). The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Several system models for simulations are described in section II, and the performance metrics which we consider are presented in section III. The simulation results and their interpretation are presented in section IV. Finally, the paper ends with some concluding remarks and the consideration for future works. II. S YSTEM M ODEL A. System Layout The system layout for simulation is depicted on Fig. 1. The total number of macrocells is 19 so that interferences from other cells are considered up to two-tier. For the reduction of simulation time, wrap-around technique is not used in this time. The performance of a macrocell is evaluated only for the center cell, while femtocells are distributed throughout the center cell. Macrocell inter-site distance (ISD) is 1.5 km, and femtocell radius is assumed as several tens meters. The number of mobile stations (MSs) which are connected to the macrocell BS is 15, and up to four femtocell MSs can be connected to the femtocell BS. Handover between a macrocell and a femtocell is not considered, so the performances of macrocell MSs and femtocell MSs are evaluated independently. The target system which operates in TDD mode is assumed to be in perfect synchronization between femtocell and macrocell networks. We consider the downlink case only. B. OFDMA Frame Structure

AbstractFemtocell can provide better indoor coverage and capacity of cellular systems. In order to operate femtocell appropriately, RF interference analysis between femtocells and macrocells is needed. In this paper, we discussed the impact of interference by the introduction of femtocell in Mobile WiMAX system. Performance degradation was evaluated for the downlink case by system level simulation. Simulation results shows that the impact of interference from macrocell to femtocell is more severe than from femtocell to macrocell. By allocating different frequency bands for femtocell and macrocell, performance degradation can be negligible. Index TermsFemtocell, Mobile WiMAX, Interference Analysis.

I. I NTRODUCTION As the demand for higher data rates and reliable wireless services in homes and buildings increases, the femtocell concept has been proposed recently. A femtocell base station (BS) is a low-power wireless access point that operates in licensed spectrum to connect standard mobile devices to the mobile operators network using residential DSL or cable broadband connections [1]. Femtocells allow service providers to extend indoor service coverage, especially where access to the wireless networks would be limited or unavailable. The advantages of the femtocell are summarized as follows: 1) better indoor coverage and capacity, 2) improved marcocell reliability, 3) cost benets, 4) reduced subscriber turnover [2]. With increasing interest to femtocell, many manufacturers are developing femtocell chipsets, and some femtocell prototypes are already unveiled. Several mobile operators throughout the world also announced their plans for the introduction and trials of femtocell technologies. In standardization committees like 3GPP and 3GPP2, femtocell-related studies have just been started [3, 4]. The study items include the following: system architecture, basic functionality, mobility, RF-related issues, operation and maintenance, self optimization, security, network synchronization, handover procedure,
This work was partly supported by the Brain Korea 21 project and the IT R&D program of MKE/IITA. [2007-S-029-02, Development of Indoor WiBro System for Home and Enterprise]

Orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) is a multi-carrier technology that extends OFDM to a multiple

Figure 2.

OFDMA downlink subframe structure for macrocell user TABLE I OFDMA PARAMETERS Parameter System channel bandwidth Value 10 MHz 11.2 Mhz 1024 10.94 kHz 91.4 s 11.4 s 102.9 s 5 ms 48 720

Figure 1.

Macrocell/Femtocell system layout

Sampling frequency FFT Size (NF F T ) Subcarrier frequency spacing (f )

access technology. OFDMA supports the assignment of individual groups of subcarriers to specic users. Each subcarrier group is denoted as a subchannel, and each user is assigned one or more subchannels for transmission depending on each users specic trafc requirements [6]. With PUSC (partial usage of subcarriers) scheme, subchannels are realized using a distributed subcarrier permutation method that pseudo-randomly draws subcarriers to form a subchannel. It is primarily used to achieve frequency diversity when it is difcult to track frequency-selective channel variations and to allocate resources adaptively according to these variations [7]. A subchannel consists of two pilot subcarriers and 24 data subcarriers. In the time domain, OFDMA frame duration is equivalent to 48 OFDMA symbol durations. Each frame is partitioned into downlink (DL) subframe and uplink (UL) subframe. DL/UL ratio is equal to 32:15. Fig. 2 is DL subframe structure for macrocell users. As shown in the gure, we assume that the control overheads such as preamble, FCH, DL-MAP, and UL-MAP are xed to two OFDMA symbols. For the ease of the analysis, the remaining data region is partitioned equally into 15 DL bursts, so all of the macrocell users have same radio resource allocation. One DL burst corresponds to 10 subchannel 6 OFDMA symbols. The number of data subcarriers allocated to a macrocell user for a frame duration is 1,440(= 10 24 6). In case of femtocell, the data region is partitioned into four equal DL bursts, and the burst size is 15 subchannel 15 OFDMA symbols. Other OFDMA parameters are summarized in Table I. C. Path Loss Model Path loss between a macrocell MS and the macrocell BS is characterized by ITU-R vehicular test environment model [8]. With the typical macrocell BS height of 32 m and the average

Useful symbol time (Tb = 1/f ) Guard time (Tg = Tb /8) OFDM symbol duration (Ts = Tb + Tg ) Frame duration Number of OFDM symbols per frame Number of DL data subcarriers

rooftop height of 15 m, the path loss can be calculated as follows: P Lmacro (dB) = 130.68 + 37.6 log10 (R) (1)

where R is the distance from the transmitter (Tx) to the receiver (Rx) in kilometers. For a femtocell MS which is connected to the femtocell BS, Home NodeB (HNB) apartment building model is used [9]. HNB is the 3GPP terminology for the femtocell BS. This model was proposed for studying interference scenarios between HNBs, and is characterized as follows: P Lf emto (dB) = 20 log10 4d + qW + F n( n+1 0.46)
n+2

(2) The rst term is the free space path loss, the the second is partition loss, and the third is the oor loss. We ignore the oor loss in this case. W is the partition loss due to the wall, and the value is xed to be 5 dB. q is a random variable representing the total number of walls between Tx and Rx. The d value of q is chosen from the set 0, 1, ..., with equal dw probability, where dw represents the minimum wall separation and is assumed to be 2 m. In case of the other propagation scenario such as outdoorto-indoor, the path loss is obtained from the combination of

TABLE II A DDITIONAL S IMULATION PARAMETERS Parameter Carrier frequency Frequency reuse Maximum Transmit power (macro BS / femto BS / MS) Antenna conguration Antenna gain (macro BS / femto BS / MS) Noise gure (macro BS / femto BS / MS) Lognormal shadowing standard deviation (macrocell / femtocell) Figure 3. Snapshot of frequency response of multipath channel realization
(0) (0)

Value 2.5 GHz (1, 1, 1) 43 dBm / 20 dBm / 23 dBm SISO, Omnidirectional 15 dBi / 2 dBi / 0 dBi 4 dB / 5 dB / 7 dB 8 dB / 7 dB

above two models and additional outdoor penetration loss Low . It is assumed that Low is 10 dB with probability 0.8 and 2 dB with probability 0.2 which accounts for windows. D. Multipath Model Mobile WiMAX system exploits instantaneous channel conditions for the performance enhancement such as channel dependent scheduling and adaptive modulation and coding (AMC). For the realistic system performance evaluation, shortterm time-varying channel characteristics should be considered during simulation as well as geometric path loss and long-term shadow fading. Time-varying short-term fading effect can be generated by power delay proles. Conventional six-tap ITU models [8] which were originally developed for 5 MHz bandwidth channels are not adequate to the target system which has 10 MHz system bandwidth. As the bandwidth increases, the time resolution in the delay domain increases so that more taps are required [10]. Modied ITU power delay proles with 24-taps proposed in [11] were used. Fig. 3 shows a snapshot of frequency response of modied ITU Pedestrian B and Vehicular A model. By considering user mobility, different mixed user channel models were chosen for macrocell and femtocell users respectively. In case of macrocell, typical mixed user channel model [12] was usedPed-B 3km/h: 60%, Veh-A 30km/h: 30%, Veh-A 120km/h: 10%. In case of femtocell, the channel mix model for indoor small ofce scenario in [10] is used Ped-B 0km/h: 80%, Ped-B 3km/h: 20%. The multipath channel gain between the MSs and the BSs was generated once per frame. Additional simulation parameters are presented in Table II. III. P ERFORMANCE M ETRICS A. Per-subcarrier SINR The instantaneous SINR of the nth subcarrier of a MS which is connected to the BS 0 is given by

2 PT x GT x GRx H (0) (n) (0) (0) PL SIN R (n) = J P (j) G(j) G 2 T x T x Rx H (j) (n) + PN P L(j) j=1 (j)

(3)

PT x : transmit power per subcarrier from the jth BS, GT x : transmit antenna gain of the jth BS, GRx : receive antenna gain of the target MS, P L(j) : distance dependent path loss including shadowing from the jth BS, H (j) (n) : multipath channel gain of the desired MS for the nth subcarrier and the jth BS, J : total number of interferers,
(j)

PN : thermal noise per subcarrier. For each MS, all of the instantaneous SINRs of data subcarriers within the DL burst are collected. B. Effective SINR The effective SINR for each DL burst is calculated. Owing to the frequency selectivity of broadband channels, the average SINR over all the subcarriers that constitute a given burst is not a good indicator of the effective SINR, since averaging fails to capture the variation of the SINR over all the subcarriers. Several metrics, such as EESM (exponentially effective SINR map), ECRM (effective code rate map), and MIC (mean instantaneous capacity), are widely accepted as better representatives of the effective SINR to capture the variation of SINR in the subcarrier domain [13]. We chose the MIC metric, and the effective SINR ef f is calculated as follows:
N 1 N

log2 (1+n )
n=1

ef f = 2

(4)

where n is the per-subcarrier SINR, N is the total number subcarriers within the burst.

TABLE III D OWNLINK MCS L EVEL Modulation QPSK 16QAM 64QAM Code Rate 1/2 3/4 1/2 3/4 1/2 2/3 3/4 5/6 SINR Threshold 5.0 dB 8.4 dB 10.7 dB 14.8 dB 15.9 dB 19.0 dB 20.1 dB 22.0 dB Modulation Efciency 1.0 bit/symbol/subcarrier 1.5 bits/symbol/subcarrier 2.0 bits/symbol/subcarrier 3.0 bits/symbol/subcarrier 3.0 bits/symbol/subcarrier 4.0 bits/symbol/subcarrier 4.5 bits/symbol/subcarrier 5.0 bits/symbol/subcarrier

TABLE IV M ACROCELL D OWNLINK P ERFORMANCE WITH F EMTOCELL I NTERFERENCE Number of femtocell BSs per macrocell 10 20 30 40 Macrocell Throughput 6.84 Mbps 6.81 Mbps 6.69 Mbps 6.56 Mbps Spectral Efciency 1.03 bps/Hz 1.02 bps/Hz 1.00 bps/Hz 0.98 bps/Hz

C. Average Cell Throughput From the effective SINR, the modulation and coding scheme (MCS) for each user is selected. The MCS level for the downlink is described in Table III. Information bits that each user received are calculated by producting the modulation efciency and the total data subcarriers allocated. For example, for a macrocell user whose MCS level is 16QAM 1/2, the received information bits are 2 1,440 = 2,880 bits. User throughput is calculated by dividing the received information bits by the frame duration. Cell throughput is the summation of all user throughputs within the cell. Finally, cell throughputs are averaged over several thousands of Monte Carlo trials. D. Spectral Efciency The average cell spectral efciency is dened as SE = R BWef f (5)
Num. of femtocell BSs per macrocell 10 20 30 40 Femtocell Throughput Without Macrocell BS 21.54Mbps 21.46Mbps 21.36Mbps 21.26Mbps With Macrocell BS 16.99Mbps 16.98Mbps 16.97Mbps 16.91Mbps Spectral Efciency Without Macrocell BS 3.23bps/Hz 3.22bps/Hz 3.20bps/Hz 3.19bps/Hz With Macrocell BS 2.55bps/Hz 2.55bps/Hz 2.55bps/Hz 2.54bps/Hz

Figure 4. Spectral efciency degradation of macrocell due to the femtocell interferences TABLE V F EMTOOCELL D OWNLINK P ERFORMANCE R ESULTS WITH OR WITHOUT M ACROCELL I NTERFERENCE

where R is the average cell throughput, BWef f is the effective channel bandwidth. The effective channel bandwidth is dened as BWef f = BW T R (6)

where BW is the used channel bandwidth, and T R is time ratio of the link. In case of downlink, T R = 32/48, so BWef f = 10MHz 32/48 = 6.67MHz. IV. S IMULATION R ESULTS We rst analyzed the impact of the femtocell BS to macrocell MSs. Theoretically, OFDMA uses orthogonal subcarriers so that there is no intra-cell interference within a macrocell but the inter-cell interference between macrocells. Signal from the femtocell BS can be regarded as intra-cell interference. The performance of macrocell without femtocell interference was evaluated for the reference. In case of uniformly distributed macrocell MSs, the average macrocell downlink throughput was about 7.0 Mbps and corresponding spectral efciency was 1.05 bps/Hz. Table IV is the macrocell downlink performance with additional femtocell interferences. As femtocell density increases, the macrocell MS perceives more intra-cell interferences, so the degradation of spectral efciency of macrocell

due to femtocell interferences also increases. This is shown in Fig. 4. Next, the impact of the macrocell BS to femtocell users and their simulation results are presented in Table V. Due to the small coverage and the relative high transmit power of the femtocell BS, femtocell throughput and spectral efciency shows the almost theoretical maximum value in the absence of macrocell BS interference. As the femtocell density increases, the inter-cell interference between femtocells also increases, but the performance degradation is negligible. When considering interference from the macrocell BS, the degradation of spectral efciency of femtocell is about 20%. This value is much higher compared to the prior case where the degradation is about 26%. We can say that if the femtocell is located close to the macrocell BS, the performance of femtocell severely

TABLE VI M ACROCELL D OWNLINK P ERFORMANCE WITH RESPECT TO THE D ISTANCE FROM THE TARGET BS MS location 0 0.1R 0.1 0.2R 0.2 0.3R 0.3 0.4R 0.4 0.5R 0.5 0.6R 0.6 0.7R 0.7 0.8R 0.8 0.9R 0.9 1.0R Cell Throughput 21.36 Mbps 18.12 Mbps 12.88 Mbps 8.56 Mbps 5.52 Mbps 3.56 Mbps 2.30 Mbps 1.50 Mbps 0.91 Mbps 0.57 Mbps Spectral Efciency 3.20 bps/Hz 2.72 bps/Hz 1.93 bps/Hz 1.28 bps/Hz 0.83 bps/Hz 0.53 bps/Hz 0.35 bps/Hz 0.23 bps/Hz 0.14 bps/Hz 0.09 bps/Hz

V. C ONCLUSION In this paper, interference analysis between femtocell and macrocell for the Mobile WiMAX system was presented. From the simulation results, we observed that if the femtocells and the macrocells are operated at the same frequency band, the performance degradation is not as small as we can ignore. And the performance degradation is more severe when the femtocel MSs are victims and the macrocell BSs are interferers. If the femtocells are operated at adjacent frequency band, the impact of interferences between two networks can be signicantly reduced. To maximize the overall system capacity, more judicious transmit power control and frequency planning scheme should be considered. We assumed perfect synchronization between macrocell and femtocell networks. In reality, femtocell BS is hard to achieve synchronization to the networks because it is installed indoors so the signal for synchronization from GPS is not easily detected. In such a case, there may be more interference scenarios, and these will be considered in the future. R EFERENCES
[1] Femtocell Forum, http://www.femtoforum.com [2] V. Chandrasekhar, J. Andrews, and A. Gatherer, Femtocell Networks: A Survey, unpublished. [online]. Avaliable: http://aps.arxiv.org/abs/0803. 0952 [3] 3GPP, 3G Home NodeB Study Item Technical Report, 3GPP TR 25.820, ver. 8.0.0, Mar. 2008. [4] 3GPP2, Femto Cell workshop, http://www.3gpp2.org/public html/ FEMTO, Oct. 2007. [5] Webpage, Wikipedia:Femtocell, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/femtocell [6] Alvarion White Paper, Understanding the Radio Technologies of Mobile WiMAX And their effect on network deployment optimization, 2006 [7] K. Balachandran et al., Design and Analysis of an IEEE 802.16e-Based OFDMA Communication Sysetem, Bell Labs Technical Journal, Issue 4, pp. 5373, Mar. 2007. [8] ITUR recommendation M.1225, Guidelines for evaluation of radio transmission technologies for IMT2000, 1997. [9] Qualcomm Europe, HNB and HNBMacro Propagation Models, 3GPP R4071617, Oct. 2007. [10] IEEE 802.16m07/037r2, Draft IEEE 802.16m Evaluation Methodology, Dec. 2007. [11] IEEE C802.16m07/181, Wideband Extension of the ITU proles with desired spaced-frequency correlation, Sep. 2007. [12] WiMAX Forum, Mobile WiMAX Part 1: A Technical Overview and Performance Evaluation, Feb. 2006. [13] J. G. Andrews, A. Ghosh, and R. Muhamed, Fundamentals of WiMAX: Understanding Broadband Wireless Networking, Prentice Hall, 2007.

degrades. To reduce the impact of interferences, different frequency bands can be allocated to femtocell and macrocell respectively. Then the interferences between the other networks are lowered by the value of the ACIR (Adjacent Channel Interference Power Ratio). ACIR is dened as the ratio of the total power transmitted from a source (BS or MS) to the total interference power affecting a victim receiver, resulting from both transmitter and receiver imperfections. With the assumption of ACIRmacro = 37.5 dB and ACIRfemto = 25.5 dB, the degradation of spectral efciency was almost negligible for both cases. So far, we assumed that the femtocell BS operates in closed access mode. Closed access means that the femtocell BS only serves the MSs which are a member of a particular Closed Subscriber Group. In contrast, the femtocell BS which operates in open access mode can serve any MS [3]. That is, the MS served by the macrocell BS can be connected to the nearby femtocell BS as it moves. Table VI is the downlink throughput of macrocell with the distance from the target BS. Obviously, as the MS moves towards the cell edge, the performance is severely degraded due to reduced signal level and increased inter-cell interferences. The overall system capacity would be signicantly improved by deploying the open access femtocell BSs to the place where the the signal from the macrocell BS is limited such as cell edge or where the trafc is very high.