Hybrid spectrum sharing for coexistence of macrocell and femtocell

This paper investigates flexible spectrum sharing for coexistence of macrocell and femtocell. In such a networking environment, shared spectrum usage and partitioned spectrum usage are two options to be employed between them. After recognizing the pros and cons of these two usages, we propose hybrid spectrum sharing to take advantage of their merits. In our proposal, the femtocells embedded in macrocell are differentiated to inner and outer femtocells, which operate in partitioned spectrum usage and shared spectrum usage, respectively. Performance evaluation are given to justify our proposed method on improving overall spectrum utilization.