Road Gateways for femtocell clusters to enable communication and handover in dead zones

Femtocells are indoor wireless access points that are used to provide cellular access to devices inside a building where macrocells cannot. Dead zones are indoor or outdoor places where there is no macrocell coverage and hence, lack of data transmission capability and absence of signal strength are common in dead zones. In the LTE-femtocell architecture, the communication between two user equipments connected to Home evolved NodeBs (HeNBs) and the handover between two HeNBs are carried out by the Home evolved NodeB-Gateway (HeNB-GW) and the Mobility Management Entity (MME). This paper describes an architecture using Road Gateways (RGW) that work along with femtocells for providing seamless communication in dead zones. This paper also describes the communication and handover procedures in the new architecture. In the proposed architecture, the communication between two user equipments connected to HeNBs and the handover between two HeNBs are carried out using the RGW without involving the HeNB-GW and the MME. The performance of the proposed architecture is evaluated using an analytical model and it is found that the handover signalling cost is reduced when compared to the conventional LTE-femtocell architecture.