Spectral-Energy Efficiency Trade-off of Cellular Systems with Mobile Femtocell Deployment

Mobile femtocell (MFemtocell) is a new concept that has been proposed recently to be a potential wireless communication technology for the next generation cellular systems. The essence of MFemtocell lies in adopting the femtocell technology inside vehicles such as trains, buses, or private cars, to provide better coverage and good Internet experience whilst on the move. In this paper, we investigate the spectral and energy efficiency for the MFemtocell-assisted network with different resource partitioning schemes. Closed-form expressions for the relationships between the spectral efficiency and energy efficiency are derived for a link-level MFemtocell network. We also investigate the spectral efficiency for multi-user system-level MFemtocells with opportunistic scheduling schemes. Our analysis shows that MFemtocells can provide better spectral and energy efficiency compared to direct transmission scheme.