Coverage Prediction for Heterogeneous Networks: From Macrocells to Femtocells
Abstract: Wide-range wireless communications have always suffered from the difficulty to predict efficiently the quality of each radio link of a large network in very heterogeneous environments. Planning and optimization tools are developed from decades to help operators on deploying wireless networks with the better tradeoff between quality and cost, and also sometimes including fairness. With the increasing demand for high throughput combined with mobility, a high densification of the network is required. One important way of increasing this density is based on Femtocells (with 3G or 4G capability). But this uncontrolled deployment of home-based stations comes with hard optimization problems: what will be the interference between the existing network (macrocell) and the new femtocells ? What will be the interference between different femtocells in the same area ? Could we use collaboration between femtocells to enhance the global efficiency? In this talk we will first present in details different models to predict the radio link quality: empiricals, deterministics, statisticals or hybrids. Then particular problems like outdoor to indoor or indoor to outdoor propagation will be addressed. Furthermore, extraction of wideband statistics required to evaluate OFDMA performance and interference between cells will be discussed. Based on the experience from the FP7 project iPlan, we will present some efficient ways of building a complete system-level evaluation of Femtocells potential.
Biography: Guillaume Villemaud received the M.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Limoges, France, in 1999. From 1999 to 2002 he worked at IRCOM, Limoges, France, on compact integrated antennas and received his PhD degree in electronics in 2002. He developed multi-band hybrid arrays for mobile phone localization for CREAPE from 2002 to 2003 and then joined the CITI Laboratory, Lyon, France, in 2003. He is currently an Associate Professor at INSA Lyon, France, Head of the international exchange office of the Electrical Engineering Department and member of the Executive Committee. His research interests are antenna design and integration, antenna diversity and multiple antenna processing (SIMO, MIMO), and system level simulation, coverage prediction, radio propagation and measurements. He is currently the site leader for the FP7 project iPlan for the development of planning and optimization tools for the deployment of Femtocells, also responsible of the Flexible radio terminals ‘axis of the INRIA SOCRATE team. He is also strongly involved in the development of the Cognitive Radio platform, part of the Future Internet-of-things equipment of excellence funded by the French government. He has published more than 80 international technical papers.
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