Interference-Controlled Load Sharing with Femtocell Relay for Macrocells in Cellular Networks

With the ever-growing demands of wireless communications, traffic load sharing is essentially important to provide consistent high quality of service (QoS). It is known that the QoS of mobile users is affected by the limited bandwidth in both wireless link and wired backhaul link beyond a base station (BS). Femtocell is a promising technology to bear part of the traffic load from the BS. Nonetheless, due to the small coverage and possible closed service policy, the number of users within a femtocell is so restricted that only a small part of the traffic load can be transferred via the femtocell. Hence, it has little help to relieve the regular BS traffic load. In this paper, we propose a femtocell relay method to increase the number of users using femtocell and further reduce the traffic load in macrocell. Specifically, femtocell users provide relay service for nearby users connected to the macrocell BS and get reward bonus through balancing the traffic load. The simulation results have shown that our method can effectively reduce the traffic load in the macrocell and improve the delivery performance for regular network traffic.