Abstract
In this article, we study and analyze the impact of modern buildings, with increased building penetration losses (BPLs), on different cellular deployment strategies based on traditional outdoor (macro) and dedicated indoor (femto) solutions in a suburban environment. The analysis covers both indoor and outdoor use cases, and the performance of the deployment strategies is evaluated in terms of network coverage, spectral and energy efficiency. The obtained results indicate that the indoor performance of pure macrocellular network in terms of coverage, capacity and energy efficiency is highly degraded with increasing wall penetration losses of modern buildings. Hence, the best strategy to overcome this problem is by deploying indoor femtocells, whose indoor performance is shown to actually benefit from increased BPLs. However, the outdoor performance of pure femtocell deployment is shown to degrade due to increased BPLs. Stemming from this, a heterogeneous Macro-Femto co-channel deployment solution is also analyzed and shown to deliver a balanced performance for both outdoor and indoor environments in terms of coverage, capacity and energy efficiency. These findings strongly motivate towards heterogeneous network deployments in the future, where indoor network elements play an increasingly important role.