Antenna characteristics impact on LTE inter-cell interference performance in urban scenarios

Abstract

The main objective of this work was the evaluation of LTE performance in urban scenarios concerning inter-cell interference via antenna aspects. A detailed analysis of the effect of the antenna's electrical downtilt on interference minimisation was addressed for the 800, 1800 and 2600 MHz bands in dense urban (centre of Lisbon) and urban (off-centre of Lisbon) environments, followed by an analysis of the vertical half-power beam width impact on one of those cases. A stochastically generated line of sight occurrence, a contiguous spectrum distribution and a received power based association of users to sectors was considered in a model intended to represent a real network as close as possible. In a high load scenarios analysis, it was found that although an electrical downtilt variation improves the number of users served per sector (up to 5.2% improvement) and user's throughput (up to 27.3% higher throughput) over the reference scenario, best enhancements happen when a vertical half-power beam width variation is also considered, leading to improvements of 31.4% and 82.9%, respectively.