Cellular radiotelephone communications utilize a network of cells having a base station with one or more antennae that allow the base station to communicate with multiple mobile devices within the cell. These cells typically overlap to provide complete coverage. A mobile device may move from between cells, which results in communication with multiple base stations.
A recent development is the concept of hierarchical cells. A hierarchical cell structure may include, for example, macrocells, microcells and picocells. Macrocells may provide coverage over a relatively large area. One or more microcells may exist within a macrocell and may be used for outdoor coverage, where high capacity is required and larger macrocells cannot cover, such as city streets hidden by large buildings.
One or more picocells may exist within a microcell. Picocells could be deployed for private, indoor services. The picocell locations could be in areas where there is a demand for high data rate services, such as laptop networking or multimedia conferencing. While this hierarchical cell architecture may provide an improvement over other network architectures, the resulting cell structure may not result in optimal performance.