Please Lower Small Cell Antenna Heights in 5G

TL;DR

Lowering small cell antenna heights to match user equipment levels is crucial for maximizing capacity in 5G ultra-dense networks, as higher antennas can degrade performance despite increased infrastructure.

Contribution

This paper reveals the negative impact of height differences on network capacity and proposes lowering antenna heights to optimize 5G ultra-dense small cell network performance.

Findings

Network capacity decreases with increased BS density if antenna heights differ.

Lowering BS antennas to UE height improves network performance.

Deploying at UE antenna height requires new BS architecture and deployment strategies.

Abstract

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.