Effect of Shadowing and Multipath Fading on the Area Spectral Efficiency of a Macro-Femto Heterogeneous Network for Cell-Edge Users

The traditional macro-only network is not effective especially when communication signal is required for users far away from the macrocell base station and located in the cell edge. The signal strength reaching these users is excessively attenuated due to fading and shadowing. The deployment of femtocells around the cell edge of this macrocell helps to reduce the effect of fading and shadowing thereby increasing the overall efficiency of the cellular network. This holds a great promise for adaptive space-based wireless sensor networks, formation-flying satellites and constellations. Keywords: Femtocells; Heterogeneous networks; Macrocells; Spectral Efficiency; Uplink