Abstract: The phenomenon of improving the indoor coverage and enhancing network capacity to provide high data rate services in a cost effective manner is a major challenge to the next generation wireless communication. To overcome this challenge, the transmitters and receivers may be made closer to each other as per the traditional approach. But this may lead to installing several base stations. Hence, the home base stations, commonly called as femtocells, have to be used over a macrocell. Since the femtocells share the same spectrum, the interference mitigation among neighbouring femtocells and among femtocells and macrocell will be the major challenges in wireless networks. Hence, the aim of this survey is to analyze the technical challenges in designing femtocell networks such as access modes, handover, mobility management, self organization, security, timing and synchronization and interference management.

Keywords: Femtocell, technical challenges, interference management, survey, wireless networks.