A system-level simulation framework for LTE Femtocells

Femtocells represent a new technological advance, conceived to significantly boost cellular network performance. At the same time, several issues that could arise with their deployment, still need to be investigated. Unfortunately, to the best of our knowledge, no accurate simulation tools are freely available for dealing with femtocells. To bridge this gap, we propose herein an open source module implemented within the emerging LTE-Sim framework. It targets heterogeneous scenarios with both macro and femtocells and, thanks to its flexibility, it is well suited to study spectrum allocation techniques, user mobility, femtocell access policies, and several other problems related to femtocell deployment in a LTE network. We claim that this new module can be of high interest for the research community because it offers a very wide range of scenarios and tunable parameters and because, thanks to its high modularity, it can be simply extended for the study of current and future hybrid network architectures.