Impact of Macrocellular Network Densification on the Capacity, Energy and Cost Efficiency in Dense Urban Environment

This paper aims to show the effect of macrocellular network densification on the capacity, energy and costefficiency. The presented results are based on radio propagation simulations that consider macrocellularnetwork with different inter-site distances, i.e. different site densities, and also take into account thepresence of indoor receiver points by varying outdoor and indoor receiver distribution. It is observed thatas a result of densifying the network, the cell spectral efficiency reduces due to increasing level of inter-cellinterference. However, as a result of densification, the network area capacity can be improved since thearea spectral efficiency increases. Nevertheless, the densification efficiency decreases because of thereduction of cell spectral efficiency, especially when indoor receiver points are taken into account. Theresults hence indicate that densification of macrocellular network suffers from inefficiency which results inhigher energy and cost per bit per Hertz, and thus calls for alternative methods to deploy networks, oralternatively, more sophisticated methods, such as base station coordination or inter-cell interferencecancellation techniques, to be implemented for future cellular networks