Improving broadband throughput in semi-permanently crowded indoor areas

In the 2010s, the use of Smartphone’s, tables and several high resource demanding personal hand-held devices has increased enormously, leading to a remarkable growth in mobile broadband subscription and data traffic. Most of the time people connect to the mobile internet in various indoor areas (for example markets, schools, and offices) which tend to be occupied by hight density crowds in limited periods of time. These occasionally large crowds coupled with poor indoor coverage may degrade the quality of user experience significantly, hence mobile operator face challenges in finding a cost and energy efficient solution for providing broadband throughput in indoor areas. This study used small cell deployment as an alternative solution for providing broadband throughput, whereby the WinProp simulator was used to deploy small cells in the selected indoor area and perform propagation modeling to obtain the path loss results for signal propagating from the macro-cell to user equipment and from small-cell to user equipment. The path loss results were imported into Matlab LYE (Long Term Evolution) simulator for statistical analysis, also the analysis took into consideration the variation on backhauling frequency, the operating frequency and the carrier bandwidth to see their impact on the throughput results. The simulation results highlight that the indoor small cells offload the traffic from macro cells and results into increased throughput to the user’s equipment. In addition, when 10% of the users are idle indoor users receives around 13 times the throughput while connected to small cells compared to macro cells.