The use of femtocells is an efficient way to improve coverage and quality of service while on the other side the deployment cost for the service provider is kept in extremely low level. Long Term Evolution Advanced (LTE-A) systems with femtocell overlays aim to provide better indoor voice and data coverage and to increase network capacity. One of the major technical challenges that femtocell networks are facing nowadays, is the cross-tier interference, i.e., the interference between the femto base stations and the macrocell infrastructure. To this direction, we have designed and implemented a framework that simulates femtocell overlays integrated over LTE-A macrocellular systems. This framework focuses on the impact of cross-tier interference and furthermore is able to estimate the throughput at every point of integrated femtocell/macrocell LTE-A networks. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of this simulation framework and we provide significant experimental results obtained with the aid of this system.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.