Femtocell deployment in LTE-A networks: A sustainability, economical and capacity analysis

Increasingly mobile data traffic and high quality service demand has driven standard developments and new mobile technologies deployment at an unprecedented level. Long Term Evolution (LTE) standard and its improved version LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) are two technology standards developed to cope with high levels of mobile data traffic demand. However, traffic and revenue disparity still is a reality, suggesting that traditional network deployment methods — based mainly on macro cellular sites — might prove to be cost ineffective in the long term. From another perspective, and increasingly important for mobile network operators, revenue is also a function of each mobile network deployment´s sustainability. This work aims to comprehensively elaborate on those matters by presenting four specific scenarios with a comparative analysis of both macro and femtocell deployments (single and both technology networks). For each scenario, capacity, cost effectiveness and expected carbon emissions are the evaluated key indicators. This kind of analysis provides mobile networks operators with relevant information, enabling them to sustainably adapt business and provisioning models as well as network deployment strategies to current and future technological standards, while minimizing capital and operational expenditure (CAPEX/OPEX). The main contribution is that in short term, mixed macro and femtocell deployment scenarios are the most cost effective and sustainable option, while in mid to long term, as data traffic demand rises, femtocell deployments become the most sustainable, not only from economical and environmental points of view, but also from network coverage stand point.