In preparation towards future cellular networks: the detailed analysis of macro and micro site densification and sector densification

The next generation of cellular networks is expected to provide huge capacity, and site densification is one of the possible solution to increase the network capacity. The target of this paper is to show the impact of macro/micro site densification and higher order sectorization on signal strength, signal quality and throughput in LTE network. It also highlights the impact of site and sector densification on the cell overlapping and cell border areas. A detailed techno-economical analysis along with area power consumption and area spectral efficiency is also provided in this paper. In site densification, the intersite distance (ISD) between the base station sites is decreased, which results in strong inter cell interference. The results presented in this paper show that the spectral efficiency of the cell decreases with the site densification. However, the average area spectral efficiency increases due to a larger number of cells in the densified network. At the same time the number of cell border users overlapped by multiple servers also increases with the site and sector densification. It is shown that in one square kilometer, increasing the number of cells from 14 (3-sector site with 500 m ISD) to 693 (6-sector site with 100 m ISD) relatively improves the area spectral efficiency by 24.5 times at the cost of 49.5 times more number of cells. Almost identical power efficiency is provided with 3-, and 6-sector site. However, a higher order sectored site was found to be more cost efficient.