Wide Area Femtocells to Enhance the Rural Coverage

There are so many rural areas in South Africa that still pose a serious challenge for mobile operators to provide coverage. The operators have GSM sites in most of the areas but there is still a challenge to provide full coverage in some areas. The costs of building the macro-bts sites are quite high so a solution is needed to provide coverage in some of the poorly covered areas.

Two years go I wrote a paper on Wireless Mesh Networks to provide the coverage in rural areas and I would now like to enhance the topic.
I am currently investigating the use of Wide Area Femtocells to enhance the rural coverage. Femtocells can be deployed as cutomer equipment but customers have to carry the costs of these deployments. The alternative is for the mobile operators to deploy these Femtocells as outdoor units (Rooftops) and to use them as relay sites to provide coverage. In this scenario these Femtocells will be working similary to the GSM Cell Extenders but the question is if they are used as relay sites how can the interference problem be solved.

I am going to investigate the use of Co-Operative Diversity as used on the Wireless Mesh networks to counter-act interference.

The complete Femtocell Network design will be established looking on all RF aspects as well as the Relaying protocols to be used.

The remote management of Femtocells and the handover strategies (i.e. handover from the macro-bts to the Femtocell Zone Area and vice-versa as well as handovers between diffent Femtocells in the Femtocell Coverage Area.