Traffic offloading techniques in two-tier femtocell networks

Due to the scarcity of the wireless spectrum along with the ever increasing number of cellular wireless users and the associated drastic increase in the data traffic demand, femtocells are envisioned to provide fast, flexible, cost-efficient, and customer driven solutions to offload users from the congested macro access network and enhance the overall system performance. To control offloading and to achieve the required balance of users and traffic served by each network tier, we quantify offloading and discuss different techniques that can be used to offload users from the macro access network to the femto access network, namely, offloading via power control, offloading via femtocell deployment and offloading via biasing. In this paper, we quantify offloading when users connect to the network entity that provides the strongest instantaneous signal power in a Nakagami-m fading environment. To this end, we discuss the merits and drawbacks of each of the offloading techniques.