The aggressive spatial spectrum reuse (SSR) by network densification using smaller cells has successfully driven the wireless communication industry onward in the past decades. In our future journey toward ultra-dense networks (UDNs), a fundamental question needs to be answered. Is there a limit to SSR? In other words, when we deploy thousands or millions of small cell base stations (BSs) per square kilometer, is activating all BSs on the same time frequency resource the best strategy? In this paper, we present theoretical analyses to answer such question. In particular, we find that both the signal and interference powers become bounded in practical UDNs with a non-zero BS-to-UE antenna height difference and a finite UE density, which leads to a constant capacity scaling law. As a result, there exists an optimal SSR density that can maximize the network capacity. Hence, the limit to SSR should be considered in the operation of future UDNs.
First, if we consider a practical non-zero BS-to-UE antenna height difference @math , then the coverage probability is shown to crash as the BS density increases in a fully-loaded UDN. This is caused by a severe in UDNs @cite_12 . The intuition of such is that the signal power becomes in UDNs due to the lower-bound on the BS-to-UE distance, as a UE cannot be closer than @math to its serving BS.
@cite_12
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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 performance in terms of both the coverage probability and the area spectral efficiency will continuously decrease toward zero as the BS density increases in ultra-dense networks (UDNs). Such findings are completely different from the conclusions in the existing works, both quantitatively and qualitatively. In particular, this performance behavior has a tremendous impact on the deployment of the 5th-generation UDNs. Network operators may invest large amounts of money in deploying more network infrastructure only to obtain even less network capacity. This paper’s results reveal that one way to address this issue is to lower the BS antenna height to the UE antenna height. However, this requires a revolutionized approach of the BS architecture and deployment, which is also explored in this paper. The concept of Ultra Dense Networks (UDN) is often seen as a key enabler of the next generation mobile networks. However, existing analysis of UDNs, including Stochastic Geometry, has not been able to fully determine the potential gains and limits of densification. In this paper we study performance of UDNs in downlink and provide new insights on the impact of antenna height and careful site selection on the network performance. We focus our investigation on the probability of coverage, average cell rate and average area spectral efficiency for networks with regular and random BS deployments. We show that under a path-loss model which considers antenna height there exists an upper limit on network performance which is dependent on the path-loss model parameters. Our analysis shows an interesting finding that even for over-densified networks a non-negligible system performance can be achieved. Very recent studies showed that in a fully loaded dense small cell network (SCN), the coverage probability performance will continuously decrease with the network densification. Such new results were captured in IEEE ComSoc Technology News with an alarming title of "Will Densification Be the Death of 5G?". In this paper, we revisit this issue from more practical views of realistic network deployment, such as a finite number of active base stations (BSs) and user equipments (UEs), a decreasing BS transmission power with the network densification, etc. Particularly, in dense SCNs, due to an oversupply of BSs with respect to UEs, a large number of BSs can be put into idle modes without signal transmission, if there is no active UE within their coverage areas. Setting those BSs into idle modes mitigates unnecessary inter-cell interference and reduces energy consumption. In this paper, we investigate the performance impact of such BS idle mode capability (IMC) on dense SCNs. Different from existing work, we consider a realistic path loss model incorporating both line-of-sight (LoS) and non-line-of-sight (NLoS) transmissions. Moreover, we obtain analytical results for the coverage probability, the area spectral efficiency (ASE) and the energy efficiency (EE) performance for SCNs with the BS IMC and show that the performance impact of the IMC on dense SCNs is significant. As the BS density surpasses the UE density in dense SCNs, the coverage probability will continuously increase toward one, addressing previous concerns on "the death of 5G". Finally, the performance improvement in terms of the EE performance is also investigated for dense SCNs using practical energy models developed in the Green-Touch project. For an arbitrarily-located user terminal (UE) in a multi-tier heterogeneous cellular wireless network, the joint distribution of the downlink SINR at the UE from the candidate serving base stations (BSs) in the accessible tiers of the network has been derived in closed form for the cases where the candidate serving BS from each accessible tier is chosen as either the one nearest to the UE [1] or the one that is received strongest (equivalently, with maximum SINR) at the UE [2], when the locations of the BSs in the tiers are modeled by independent Poisson Point Processes, and the fading on all links is assumed independent identically distributed (iid) and Rayleigh. The actual serving BS for the UE is chosen as the nearest strongest max-SINR candidate serving BS after imposing selection bias across the tiers. The above joint distributions can be used to yield the distribution of the actual SINR at the UE (i.e., when receiving from this serving BS) when no selection bias exists across tiers. However, for the practically important case of selection bias, analytical calculation of the distribution of the actual SINR presents significant challenges. This work derives and summarizes the distribution of actual downlink SINR for all the above criteria for selection of the serving BS accounting for selection bias. We then explore some implications of these results for design and operation of a heterogeneous network.