UCLA

Femtocells, also sometimes referred to using the term "Home NodeB" (HNB), are low-power, low-cost cellular base stations utilizing a high speed internet connection as the backhaul. The recent hike in interest for femtocells in the market calls for a study of their impact on quality of service and possible mechanisms in resource allocation devised to address the problems that arise from their deployment.

The work presented concentrates on three aspects of the resource allocation problem. Firstly, the access policies in heterogeneous networks consisting of macro and femto base stations are considered with the aim to ensure acceptable quality of service provided to all users while improving for some including the owners of the device. Access policies are studied that lie between the two extremes of fully open access and fully closed to exclusive owners of the device.

The second aspect under study is packet scheduling mechanisms. While works exist on intra-cellular scheduling mechanisms as well as centralized inter-cellular schemes that provide a globally near- optimal scheduling, the body of work on global and uncoordinated scheduling mechanism is small, which is explored in this work.

The third part of the study focuses on hand-off minimization over a network of moving mobile stations. We aim to find optimal handoff sequences in a series of predicted possible paths in front of a moving mobile station. A graph-based algorithm is explored in the third part of the study.