Shadowing Effect on Macro-Femto Heterogeneous Network for Cell-Edge Users

For rural and urban environment, the combined effect of the multiple impairments like multipath fading and shadowing result in faster reduction in the average signal strength as the distance from the single macrocell transmitter increases. These impairments affect the signal power causing users situated in the cell edge to experience poor reception. The deployment of femtocells around the cell edge region has proven to be an effective way of minimizing the shadowing and multipath effects thereby increasing the overall efficiency of any given cellular network. This paper only considered the impairment effect caused by shadowing. A Monte-Carlo simulation process has shown a much improved spectral efficiency for the Macro-Femto network than the macro-only setup. The results show that the area spectral efficiency for the macro-femto network increased to 75 bps/Hz/Km² for a distance of 300 m when compared to the single macro-only network which was 5.5 bps/Hz/Km² for the same distance.