Wireless Powered Dense Cellular Networks: How Many Small Cells Do We Need?

This paper focuses on wireless powered 5G dense cellular networks, where base station (BS) delivers energy to user equipment (UE) via the microwave radiation in sub-6 GHz or millimeter wave (mmWave) frequency, and UE uses the harvested energy for uplink information transmission. By addressing the impacts of employing different number of antennas and bandwidths at lower and higher frequencies, we evaluate the amount of harvested energy and throughput in such networks. Based on the derived results, we obtain the required small cell density to achieve an expected level of harvested energy or throughput. Also, we obtain that when the ratio of the number of sub-6 GHz BSs to that of the mmWave BSs is lower than a given threshold, UE harvests more energy from a mmWave BS than a sub-6 GHz BS. We find how many mmWave small cells are needed to perform better than the sub-6 GHz small cells from the perspectives of harvested energy and throughput. Our results reveal that the amount of harvested energy from the mmWave tier can be comparable to the sub-6 GHz counterpart in the dense scenarios. For the same tier scale, mmWave tier can achieve higher throughput. Furthermore, the throughput gap between different mmWave frequencies increases with the mmWave BS density.Comment: pages 1-14, accepted by IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communication

A Stochastic Geometry Framework for LOS/NLOS Propagation in Dense Small Cell Networks

The need to carry out analytical studies of wireless systems often motivates the usage of simplified models which, despite their tractability, can easily lead to an overestimation of the achievable performance. In the case of dense small cells networks, the standard single slope path-loss model has been shown to provide interesting, but supposedly too optimistic, properties such as the invariance of the outage/coverage probability and of the spectral efficiency to the base station density. This paper seeks to explore the performance of dense small cells networks when a more accurate path-loss model is taken into account. We first propose a stochastic geometry based framework for small cell networks where the signal propagation accounts for both the Line-of-Sight (LOS) and Non-Line-Of-Sight (NLOS) components, such as the model provided by the 3GPP for evaluation of pico-cells in Heterogeneous Networks. We then study the performance of these networks and we show the dependency of some metrics such as the outage/coverage probability, the spectral efficiency and Area Spectral Efficiency (ASE) on the base station density and on the LOS likelihood of the propagation environment. Specifically, we show that, with LOS/NLOS propagation, dense networks still achieve large ASE gain but, at the same time, suffer from high outage probability.Comment: Typo corrected in eq. (3); Typo corrected in legend of Fig. 1-2; Typos corrected and definitions of some variables added in Section III.E; Final result unchanged; Paper accepted to IEEE ICC 201