Access and handover management for femtocell

systems
Zhong Fan and Yong Sun
Toshiba Research Europe, Telecommunications Research Laboratory
32 Queen Square, Bristol, BS1 4ND, UK
[email protected], [email protected]
Abstract In this paper a simple and effective method has been
proposed to perform access and handover management for
femtocell systems. Firstly an analysis on interference impact on
femtocells has been provided. Then we explore several techniques
to address the interference problem between CSG (closed
subscriber group) femtocell and macrocell. When a non-CSG MS
comes close to the femtocell in question, the macrocell BS makes
the decision (based on the CSG access list exchanged from the
femtocell) that unnecessary handover will not be initiated, saving
radio resource and signaling load on the network. At the same
time various proactive interference mitigation mechanisms can
be operated. A hybrid access mode and a femtocell-initiated
handover procedure with adaptive threshold have also been
discussed.
Keywords Femtocells, handover, access management

I.

INTRODUCTION

A femtocell base station (BS) is a BS with low transmit

power, typically installed by a subscriber in home or SOHO
(small office/home office) to provide access to a closed or
open group of users as configured by the subscriber and/or the
access provider [1][2]. A femtocell BS is connected to the
service providers network via broadband connections (such as
DSL or cable). Femtocell BSs typically operate in licensed
spectrum and may use the same or different frequency as
macrocells. Their coverage may overlap with macrocell BSs.
Femtocells are seen as a promising solution for cellular
coverage improvement and provisioning of value-added
services such as IPTV [3]. For example, Vodafone launched
first UK femtocell service in June 20091. Currently there are
also many activities on femtocells in both 802.16m [1] and
3GPP LTE standards [4].
A femtocell BS may belong to one of the following three
subscriber types:
1) CSG (Closed Subscriber Group). Mobile stations (MSs)
that are not the members of the CSG are not allowed to access
CSG femtocell BSs. A good candidate identity for the CSG is
the unique MAC address of the MS. The membership of the
CSG can be modified by the service level agreement between
the subscriber and the access provider.
2) OSG (Open Subscriber Group). OSG femtocell BSs are
open to public access.
1

3) Hybrid access mode. This mode is similar to CSG with the

exception that an MS that is not part of the CSG may camp
and receive some level of service from the femtocell.
To accommodate the terminology of both WiMax and LTE
standards, in the following text we use the following terms
inter-changeably: femtocell BS = HNB (Home Node B),
macrocell BS = NB (Node B), MS (mobile station) = UE (user
equipment).
To address the problem of interference incurred from
femtocell deployment, we need to clarify several different
deployment scenarios. Firstly we assume that the HNB and the
NB are well synchronized to minimize the interference due to
the mismatch of uplink and downlink. Another assumption is
that the incoming MS into the femtocell coverage can still
communicate with the NB, which means the macrocell
network can still provide the MS with the service required by
the MS. The third assumption is that the transmission on NB
and transmission on HNB employ the same spectrum at the
same time. Finally, the HNB has multiple antennas.
When femtocells are overlaid on macrocells and they
operate on the same RF channel, co-channel interference may
occur. In particular, closed subscriber group femtocell BSs can
only be accessed by a pre-defined set of MSs. Unauthorized
users can not access a femtocell even if the received signal
strength of the femtocell becomes much larger than that of the
serving macro base station. In this case, severe interference
can arise when a non-CSG MS operates near the femtocell BS.
Because the MS is not allowed to handover to the femtocell
BS, it has to be served by the distant macrocell base station.
Therefore, the MS may cause large interference towards the
femtocell BS in the uplink and receive large interference from
the femtocell BS in the downlink [5].
This paper presents a simple and effective method to
perform access and handover management for femtocell
systems, with the aim of reducing interference and enhancing
service quality. We will first discuss the interference scenario
and its impact on the effective system performance in Section
2. Section 3 describes the proposed method for closed access.
Section 4 proposes a handover scheme for hybrid access of
femtocell deployment. Section 5 discusses some examples and
numerical results. Conclusions are drawn in Section 6.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8114857.stm

978-1-4244-2519-8/10/$26.00 2010 IEEE

II.

INTERFERENCE IMPACT ON FEMTOCELL

The interference problem for the downlink (DL) case is

shown in Figure 1, where the signal received by M_UE from
the macrocell NB has low power due to the high path loss [5].
Therefore, M_UE may experience large interference from the
CSG femtocell HNB if both HNB and NB use non-orthogonal
radio resources to serve Femto_UE and M_UE. There will
also be potential interference at the Femto_UE from the NB.
Downlink transmission
NB and HNB are well-synchronised

matrix, H is the normalized channel matrix which is

considered to be frequency independent over the signal
bandwidth, and H denotes the transpose conjugate; M is the
number of transmit antennas and in this paper it is set to 2 as
an example.
For the environment of sharing radio resources, the related
parameters of the capacity of M_UE ( CM _ UE ) and Femto_UE
( CFemto _ UE ) are listed in Table 1:
Capacity
CM _ UE

Signal power
PSeNB

Interference power
PI HeNB

CFemto _ UE

PS

PI

HeNB

eNB

Table 1: Capacity-related parameters

NB

(Macro-cell)

outdoor

indoor
M_UE

HNB

(Femto-cell)

Femto_UE

Figure 1: DL interference
Similarly, in the uplink case, M_UE may have to transmit
at high power, due to the high path loss to the macrocell NB.
As a result, the CSG femtocell HNB will suffer from high
interference from M_UE, if both M_UE and Femto_UE are
assigned non-orthogonal radio resources. There will also be
potential interference at the NB from the Femto_UE.
In femtocell deployment, interference has to be controlled
under certain level to guarantee the system performance and
efficiency. Therefore, there is a tradeoff between sharing radio
resources and system efficiency. To analyze the impact of
interference due to the resource sharing, a model is set up as
shown in Figure 2.

For Femto_UE, if we assume that the capacity from the

macrocell (without transmitting through femtocell BS) is
CFemto _ UE _ macro , the effective capacity efficiency of Femto_UE
is defined as
CFemto _UE
Femto _ UE =
100%
(2)
CFemto _ UE _ macro
In this case, if the Femto_UE receives the same capacity
through HNB as that from NB, the effective efficiency is
100%, which also means the Femto_UE receives the basic
quality as in the cellular coverage. Consequently, the
femtocell targets on achieving much more capacity efficiency.
However, due to interference, the system performance of the
femtocell and the macrocell becomes interference limited. The
interference limitation is also constrained by the signal
strength from NB and HNB.
Assuming that the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) from HNB
is SNRFemto and that from NB is SNRMacro , then the effective
SNR gain of the femtocell is GSNR (dB ) = SNRFemto SNRMacro .
For the scenario shown in Figure 2, the impact of the
interference is studied and shown in Figure 3.

Macro-BS coverage
600
= 12 dB

SNR

500

SIR M _ UE = PS eNB PI HeNB

SIR Signal to interference ratio

S H eNB
Femto_UE

Femto-BS coverage

SIR Fem to _ U E = PS HeNB PI eNB

Figure 2: Interference analysis model

A well-known MIMO capacity can be expressed as [6]:

PS
1
C = log 2 det I N +

HH H
(1)
M PI + Pn

where PS , PI , and Pn represent the power of the received

signal, interference and noise, respectively; I N is an identity

Effective capacity efficiency

I eNB

I HeNB M_UE

HeNB

eNB

S eNB

GSNR = 9 dB

400

GSNR = 12 dB
300
GSNR = 6 dB
GSNR = 9 dB

SNR

= 6 dB

200

GSNR = 3 dB

SNRmacro = 0 dB
100

GSNR = 0 dB
SNRmacro = 6 dB

0
-10

-5

10

15

20

25

30

35

SIR - Signal to interference ratio (dB)

Figure 3: Interference limited capacity performance

40

The above Figure 3 presents two scenarios of femtocell

deployment ( SNRMacro = 6dB and 0dB respectively), which
depends on Femto_UEs location in the cell coverage. It
shows clearly that deploying a femtocell can achieve better
performance if the Femto_UE is out of macrocell coverage.
It is also interesting to observe the different impacts of
interference upon the two UEs. This happens either due to
power control or in the case that a UE in one cell is moving
towards another one. Here we set that both UEs SNR as 5dB
and SIR as 10dB for normal transmission. We assume that the
SNR of M_UE increases, while it causes the SIR of
Femto_UE decreasing accordingly. Therefore, Femto_UE
loses the capacity while M_UE gains the capacity. With the
same concept of effective capacity efficiency, we can show in
Figure 4 that by certain point the Femto_UE is essentially
killed by the M_UE (about 7dB on power gain in this
example). In summary, power control is needed to balance the
power on one UE while its power interferes with another UE.
Effective capacity efficiency (%)
7

700

600

Macro-cell UE capacity
5

500

Capacity

Femto effective efficiency

4

400

300

200

Femto-cell UE capacity
100

10

Power gain on Macro UE (dB)

Figure 4: Interference impact on two UEs

It has been envisaged that a majority of femtocells
deployed will be CSG-based. This paper proposes a
mechanism to address this interference issue for CSG
femtocells. It focuses on the self-configuration capability of
femtocells.
III.

CLOSED ACCESS FEMTOCELLS

As discussed previously, the closed access mode is strictly

closed to CSG members. When a non-CSG UE moves into the
coverage area of a femtocell, the HNB measures the potential
interference from the UE to the HNB: it may be able to
monitor the UE and obtain all the necessary information of the
UE as usual, including its CQI (Channel Quality Indicator)
and transmission requests (e.g., PHY parameters and quality
of service (QoS) requirements, etc.). If the interference is
above a certain threshold, the HNB will start the interference
mitigation procedure as detailed below. The threshold can be
adaptive depending on the QoS of the applications the

femtocell serves, e.g., for real-time applications with stringent

QoS, the threshold is lower.
When an MS moves into the coverage range of a CSG
femtocell, due to the increased received power level (e.g.
RSSI, SINR) from the femtocell, the handover negotiation
process to the femtocell may be started. However, any
camping or handover request by the passing MSs that do not
belong to the CSG will be rejected. Such unnecessary
camping/handover attempts will result in increased network
signaling load, reduced MS battery life, and degraded user
mobility performance, e.g. dropped calls [7]. On the other
hand, without handover to the femtocell, the MS attached to
the macrocell BS will cause interference as discussed
previously.
To address this issue, a femtocell BS maintains a record of
the unique IDs (e.g. MAC addresses or IMEI numbers) of all
the MSs in its CSG list. Upon network entry, the femtocell
will pass on this list to all the macrocells it could potentially
interfere with (wirelessly or via backhaul) [8]. In this way a
macrocell will then have knowledge of the MSs served by a
particular neighboring CSG femtocell. If the femtocell is open
access, the macrocell will also note this along with the cell ID
of the femtocell BS.
When an MS comes near the femtocell, its serving
macrocell will check its unique ID against the CSG list of that
femtocell BS. If it is on the list, the macrocell will notify the
femtocell and the normal handover procedure can start
(received signal quality measurement, resource allocation,
etc.) as specified in the standard. If the incoming MS does not
belong to the CSG, the macrocell BS shall notify the femtocell
BS and not initiate handover, saving the potential futile
handover negotiation. In the meantime, a proactive
interference management process shall start. Compared to
other existing reactive interference mitigation mechanisms,
this method is quicker and ensures better QoS with seamless
connectivity.
To address the DL interference problem in Figure 1, after
the serving macrocell BS notices that an MS enters the
vicinity of an inaccessible femtocell, it will not start the
handover procedure. In the meantime, the MS sends
measurement report of the femtocell signal strength to its
serving macro base station. Then the macrocell BS may
request the interfering femtocell BS to mitigate the
interference by reducing transmission power, and/or blocking
some resource region (frequency partition) if the received
femtocell signal strength is above a given threshold. This
process can be ongoing: when the femtocell signal strength
falls below certain threshold, interference mitigation measures
can be cancelled.
On the femtocell side, the femtocell BS should have the
capability to estimate the surrounding potential interference
based on scanning the neighbouring femtocells and
macrocells. The femtocell BS estimates and reports the
interference from all neighbouring cells to the femtocell
gateway. The femtocell gateway coordinates with the
macrocell BS and neighbouring femtocell BSs to mitigate the
interference based on the scanning results. It could be

performed during femtocell BS initialization, or periodically

to adapt to the changing environment.
For the uplink (UL) interference problem, the femtocell BS
reports the signal measurement to the macro BS. If it is above
certain threshold, the macrocell BS notifies the MS in question
to exercise power control. An alternative is to use scheduling
to mitigate interference. Generally speaking, interference
mitigation efforts should be coordinated among femtocells and
macrocells. However, the impact of this on the 3GPP X2
interface needs further investigation.
It could be feasible for either NB or HNB to have spatial
freedom, e.g., the HNB is equipped with multiple antennas
that can perform multiuser transmission (for DL) and beamforming to null interference (for UL). However, the
interference could be a challenge for the MS. So, one possible
solution is to ask both HB and HNB to perform multiuser
transmission on downlink and beam-forming on uplink.
A flowchart on the operations of the proposed mechanism
is presented in Figure 5. In the closed access mode, as
discussed previously, it might be critical for a HNB to have
capability to support transmission with the interference for
both M_UE and Femto_UE. One typical example is that the
HNB can perform MU-MIMO operation to support both
M_UE and Femto_UE without interfering between them.
M_UE normal
operation with NB
M_UE enters the
vicinity of HNB
Interference
measurement:
Above threshold?

No

Yes
HNB and NB check the CSG MAC
address list and find the M_UE is
non-CSG

Yes

No

Allow M_UE
access CSG?

HNB performs
MU-MIMO for
Femto_UE &
M_UE?

HNB negotiates with

NB re. handover

No

Available radio
resource (e.g.
FDD or TDD)?

Yes
Report to
NB

Done

Femto_UE
able to cancel
interference
from NB?

Yes

No

No
M_UE handovers to
HNB

NB notifies
M_UE: no
handover

Block the
M_UE

HNB able to
cancel
interference
using
beamforming

Yes

No

Report
to NB
via HNB

Yes

M_UE able to
cancel
interference?

Yes

NBs support
to reduce
interference

No
HNB reduces
Tx power

Done

Figure 5: Interference management flowchart

However, if the HNB does not have some sophisticated
mechanism on spatial separation such as MU-MIMO, it can
perform interference cancellation by beam-forming to
eliminate the interference from the M_UE to establish the
basis of the operation. Meanwhile in this case, it is cooperative
between HNB and M_UE, as M_UE can perform beamforming to cancel the interference from the HNB, and/or, the
HNB can reduce its transmit power to manage the interference
to the M_UE.

There may be potential interference between the macrocell

NB and the Femto_UE as indicated in Figure 1. Firstly,
Femto_UE should be power-controlled by HNB to eliminate
the interference to NB since the transmission power of
Femto_UE should be much lower than that of M_UE (for
uplink case). Secondly, macrocell NB can perform spatial
separation (e.g. beam-forming) to control the interference
impact on Femto_UE, especially if Femto_UE has the
capability to perform beam-forming to cancel the interference
from NB (on downlink). The potential interference from the
macro NB to the Femto_UE can be detected/measured at the
beginning of the negotiation procedure between the NB and
HNB. It also brings one criteria for NB and HNB to determine
between closed access mode and hybrid mode, which provides
flexible access and guaranteed QoS.
IV.

HYRBID ACCESS AND HANDOVER

In contrast to strict closed access, there is also an option

called hybrid access mode that combines the concepts of open
access and closed access. In this mode the NB and HNB
should negotiate the procedure depending upon the impact of
the incoming UE and the capability of the HNB and its served
UEs. Normally the HNB operates as a CSG cell. When an
incoming non-CSG UE can potentially cause interference, it
will be allowed access. Thus, the incoming UE becomes a
member of the femtocell, which naturally removes all the
potential interference to both sides. On the other hand, in the
hybrid mode CSG users may potentially get higher priority of
access to the local network.
The negotiation process works as follows. When a nonCSG UE moves into the coverage area of a femtocell, instead
of the NB initiating the handover, the HNB measures its signal
strength and decides whether it allows hybrid access for the
UE to avoid interference. The HNB knows well the potential
interference from the UE to the HNB: it can monitor the UE
and obtain all the necessary information of the UE as usual,
including its CQI and transmission requests (e.g., PHY
parameters and QoS requirements, etc.). If the interference is
above certain threshold, the HNB will communicate with the
macrocell NB via the backhaul to request handover of the UE.
In the message sent to the NB from the HNB, there is an
indicator showing that the reason for handover is to avoid
interference to the HNB. The threshold can be adaptive
depending on the QoS of the applications the femtocell serves,
e.g., for real-time applications with stringent QoS, the
threshold is lower. Then the NB will inform the UE and start a
handover process. In the meantime, the HNB can follow a
guest access procedure according to certain security policy
including authentication and accountability.
This handover procedure is different from conventional
cellular handover as it is initiated by the target base station
(HNB in this case) to avoid interference. A message chart of
the handover is shown in Figure 6. Here the source BS of the
handover is the macrocell NB and the target BS is the HNB.
Detailed message formats can follow those as defined in the
3GPP or 802.16m standards.

EXAMPLES

As shown in Figure 1, there are two typical interferences:

interference between HNB and M_UE, and potential
interference between NB and Femto_UE.
To combat the interference between HNB and M_UE, if
HNB has multiple antennas available, then the MU-MIMO
operation is to be performed (c.f. Figure 5). Consequently,
M_UE becomes a virtual user to HNB, which means HNB
will fundamentally separate the transmission and reception
from M_UE and Femto_UE. In this case, HNB should ideally
have capability of knowing all transmissions of M_UE, or
partial transmission conditions of M_UE, such as CSI, etc.
HNB (femtocell BS)

Interference measurement
Handover request

HO request confirm
HO command
ranging
synchronization
context transfer
etc.

VI.

NB (macrocell BS)

HO complete

HO complete confirm

Figure 6: Handover in hybrid access mode

Alternatively, if M_UE can only communicate with NB,
HNB may not be able to know any transmissions of M_UE. In
this case, HNB has to treat M_UE as interference source and
perform beam-forming to cancel any interference from M_UE.
On the other hand, any interference from HNB to M_UE has
to be cancelled by M_UE by performing beam-forming as
well. Otherwise, HNB has to reduce its transmit power to
eliminate any potential interference to M_UE.
If HNB cannot perform beam-forming to cancel
interference, it has to check if it has available resources either
in frequency or time domain, so that it can block the relevant
resource partition of M_UE. If this is not possible, it has to
report the problem to NB and NB will reduce transmit power
and/or ask M_UE to reduce power.
As a numerical example, we consider the scenario used in
[7][9] where macrocell users walk past the front of a house
with a deployed femtocell. Assume that the femtocell is
located 6 m from the footpath outside the house, macrocell
calls arrive according to a Poisson distribution with the interarrival time of 30 minutes, and the average macrocell call
holding time is 2 minutes. Among the macrocell users 10% of
them belong to the femtocell CSG (e.g. family members and
friends). We also assume that in a dense urban area, there are
1,000 femtocells per km2. All the other simulation parameters
are the same as those given in [9]. The signaling cost is the
total handover time based on the assumption that each
handover procedure lasts 600 ms. This includes the
unsuccessful handover attempts by those non-CSG users too.

CONCLUSION

This paper first provides an analysis of interference

between femtocell users and macrocell users. It then proposes
a control mechanism to handle an incoming non-CSG mobile
user entering the coverage of a CSG femtocell with efficient
signalling and enabled interference management to reduce
interference, overhead and unnecessary handover in a
femtocell deployment. For closed access, femtocell and
macrocell base stations exchange CSG membership list so that
unnecessary handover signalling can be avoided. Interference
mitigation mechanisms such as MU-MIMO, beam-forming,
and resource scheduling can be used to reduce/cancel
interference. Procedures for femtocell hybrid access have also
been proposed, with femtocell initiated handover with
adaptive threshold based on QoS. No changes are required to
the UEs. Overall, the proposed scheme provides interference
protection even when MSs not belonging to the closed user
group are operating in close proximity to the femtocell BS.
21

29

20.5

28.5

20

28

handov er c os t (s ec ond)

M_UE

Figure 7(a) shows the total handover cost savings at each

minute of the simulation time in an area of 1 km2 when
femtocells exchange their CSG membership list with
macrocells to avoid futile handovers. Here strict closed access
policy is assumed. It can be seen that significant amount of
signaling load can be saved if unnecessary handover attempts
from non-CSG users are avoided.
In a hybrid access scenario, if 40% of macrocell users are
allowed access to femtocells (either permanently or
temporarily), savings on handover cost will be less as shown
in Figure 7(b), but the interference problem will be alleviated.

h a n d o v e r c o s t (s e c o n d )

V.

27.5
27

26.5
26

19.5
19
18.5
18
17.5

25.5

17

25

16.5
0

1000

2000

3000
4000
5000
simulation time (minute)

6000

7000

1000

2000

3000
4000
5000
simulation time (minute)

6000

7000

Figure 7: Handover cost savings, (a) closed access, (b) hybrid

access
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