Physical Cell Identity Self-Organization for Home eNodeB Deployment in LTE

Femtocells, also called home base stations, are small cellular access points installed by home users to get better indoor voice and data coverage with lower network operation cost. Considering the coexistence of eNB (macro cell) and a huge number of Home eNBs (femto cells), the assignment of Physical Cell Identity (PCI) among the different cells would be quite complex, especially in the user-deployment scenario of Home eNBs. In this paper, a solution of PCI self-organization for LTE Home eNB is proposed under the autonomous configuration framework of femto cells. By replacing time consuming and costly tasks with automatic mechanisms, operational expenditure of the widely distributed Home eNBs can be well reduced.