Please Lower Small Cell Antenna Heights in 5G

In this paper, we present a new and significant theoretical discovery. If the absolute height difference between base station (BS) antenna and user equipment (UE) antenna is larger than zero, then the network capacity performance in terms of the area spectral efficiency (ASE) will continuously decrease as the BS density increases for ultra-dense (UD) small cell networks (SCNs). This performance behavior has a tremendous impact on the deployment of UD SCNs in the 5th-generation (5G) era. Network operators may invest large amounts of money in deploying more network infrastructure to only obtain an even worse network performance. Our study results reveal that it is a must to lower the SCN BS antenna height to the UE antenna height to fully achieve the capacity gains of UD SCNs in 5G. However, this requires a revolutionized approach of BS architecture and deployment, which is explored in this paper too.Comment: Final version in IEEE: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7842150/. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1608.0669

Performance Analysis of Dense Small Cell Networks with Practical Antenna Heights under Rician Fading

In this paper, we examine the combined impacts of distance-dependent Rician fading channel model and the absolute difference between the heights of base station (BS) and user equipment (UE) antennas on the coverage probability and the area spectral efficiency in an interference-limited ultra-dense (UD) small cell network (SCN). Exploiting distance dependent models for both path loss and multi-path fading, we show that in interference-limited UD-SCNs, Rician fading with variant Rician K factor aggravates the performance loss caused by the difference between the heights of the BS and UE antennas in comparison to Rayleigh fading. In particular, we demonstrate that due to presence of the specular LOS component in the Rician fading, both the coverage probability and the area spectral efficiency experience a more steep decline towards zero as the BS density increases. Our performance analysis has a prominent impact on the deployment of UD-SCNs in the 5th-generation of mobile networks, as it indicates that the right modelling of multi-path fading makes a significant difference when assessing the performance of UD-SCNs with non-identical UE-BS antenna heights

On LOS Contribution to Ultra-Dense Network

Ultra-dense networks (UDNs) are widely considered as an effective solution to greatly improve coverage by shortening the communication distance between user equipments (UEs) and base stations (BSs). The reality of UDN is that line-of-sight (LOS) communication becomes more likely to occur but this desirable result also complicates the performance analysis of random UDNs and puts an obstacle on the design and optimization of UDNs. The aim of this paper is to derive analytical results that take into account the phenomenon of having mixed LOS and non line-of-sight (NLOS) links in UDNs. In particular, the use of an arbitrary shaped thinning process to model the LOS wireless links allowed us to investigate a wide set of scenarios for what concerns the desired and interfering power levels. Our contribution is an accurate approximation in closed form for the success content delivery probability (SCDP) that decouples the contribution from LOS and NLOS links. Simulation results corroborate the accuracy of the proposed approximation