Towards Fractional Cooperation in Femtocells

Femtocells have been shown to improve the quality of service for indoor users, and are actively being pursued by the wireless community. Among the possible access mechanisms for femtocells, the recent focus is on hybrid-access, wherein each femtocell allocates a portion of its resources to the nonsubscribers. In this paper, a scheme is proposed to improve the performance of a hybrid access femtocell network through fractional cooperation. This scheme enables a non-subscriber to exploit multiple femtocells, rather than a single femtocell, thereby improving throughput. We describe the basic concepts of this on-going research project, and present simulation results with realistic channel models.