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. 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. In this paper, we investigate the downlink performance of dense cellular networks with elevated base stations (BSs) using a channel model that incorporates line-of-sight (LOS) non-line-of-sight (NLOS) propagation into both small-scale and large-scale fading. Modeling LOS fading with Nakagami- @math fading, we provide a unified framework based on stochastic geometry that encompasses both closest and strongest BS association. This paper is particularized to two distance-dependent LOS NLOS models of practical interest. Considering the effect of LOS propagation alone, we derive closed-form expressions for the coverage probability with Nakagami- @math fading, showing that the performance for strongest BS association is the same as in the case of Rayleigh fading, whereas for closest BS association it monotonically increases with the shape parameter @math . Then, focusing on the effect of elevated BSs, we show that network densification eventually leads to near-universal outage even for moderately low BS densities: in particular, the maximum area spectral efficiency is proportional to the inverse of the square of the BS height. We develop a general downlink model for multi-antenna heterogeneous cellular networks (HetNets), where base stations (BSs) across tiers may differ in terms of transmit power, target signal-to-interference-ratio (SIR), deployment density, number of transmit antennas and the type of multi-antenna transmission. In particular, we consider and compare space division multiple access (SDMA), single user beamforming (SU-BF), and baseline single-input single-output (SISO) transmission. For this general model, the main contributions are: (i) ordering results for both coverage probability and per user rate in closed form for any BS distribution for the three considered techniques, using novel tools from stochastic orders, (ii) upper bounds on the coverage probability assuming a Poisson BS distribution, and (iii) a comparison of the area spectral efficiency (ASE). The analysis concretely demonstrates, for example, that for a given total number of transmit antennas in the network, it is preferable to spread them across many single-antenna BSs vs. fewer multi-antenna BSs. Another observation is that SU-BF provides higher coverage and per user data rate than SDMA, but SDMA is in some cases better in terms of ASE.