Dynamic Reservation Scheme of Physical Cell Identity for 3GPP LTE Femtocell Systems

A large number of phone calls and data services will take place in indoor environments. In Long Term Evolution (LTE), femtocell, as a home base station for indoor coverage extension and wideband data service, has recently gained significant interests from operators and consumers. Since femtocell is frequently turned on and off by a personal owner, not by a network operator, one of the key issues is that femtocell should be identified autonomously without system information to support handover from macrocell to femtocell. In this paper, we propose a dynamic reservation scheme of Physical Cell Identities (PCI) for 3GPP LTE femtocell systems. There are several reserving types, and each type reserves a different number of PCIs for femtocell. The transition among the types depends on the deployed number of femtocells, or the number of PCI confusion events. Accordingly, flexible use of PCIs can decrease PCI confusion. This reduces searching time for femtocell, and it is helpful for the quick handover from macrocell to femtocell. Simulation results show that our proposed scheme reduces average delay for identifying detected cells, and increases network capacity within equal delay constraints.