01675nas a2200181   4500008004100000245006900041210006600110260002000176300001200196520104600208653001401254653000801268100002101276700002201297700002401319700002901343856012101372       2012                        eng d00aA Simulation Framework for LTE-A Systems with Femtocell Overlays0 aSimulation Framework for LTEA Systems with Femtocell Overlays  c21 - 25 October  a85 - 903 aThe use of femtocells is an efficient way to improve cover- age and quality of service while on the other side the deployment cost for the service provider is kept in extremely low level. Long Term Evolution Advanced (LTE-A) systems with femtocell overlays aim to provide better indoor voice and data coverage and to increase network capacity. One of the major technical challenges that femtocell networks are facing nowadays, is the cross-tier interference, i.e., the interference between the femto base stations and the macrocell infrastructure. To this direction, we have designed and implemented a framework that simulates femtocell overlays integrated over LTE-A macrocellular systems. This framework focuses on the impact of cross-tier interference and furthermore is able to estimate the throughput at every point of integrated femtocell/macrocell LTE-A networks. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of this simulation framework and we provide significant experimental results obtained with the aid of this system.10aFemtocell10aLTE1 aBouras, Christos1 aPapazois, Andreas1 aKokkinos, Vasileios1 aKontodimas, Konstantinos  uhttp://telematics.upatras.gr/telematics/publications/simulation-framework-lte-systems-femtocell-overlays?language=en