Experimental Investigations of Cochannel Interference Reduction Effect at High Elevation Base Station Using Beam Tilt and Orthogonal Polarization

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of cochannel interference (CCI) generated in a mixed cell architecture in microcellular systems. In this type of microcellular systems in which both microcells and macrocells coexist in the same geographical urban area, the base station antennas mounted on the rooftops of buildings to cover wide circular radio zones suffer severe CCI from the surrounding low base stations. A dielectric-loaded slotted-cylinder antenna (DSCA) is applied to horizontally polarized omnidirectional array antennas in a height-diversity configuration with the high gain of 8 dBi, which is comparable to that of a collinear antenna, to reduce the CCI. The measurements conducted in a suburban area clarify the reduction in the CCI for three techniques. The beam-tilt technique reduces the CCI level by approximately 10 dB for both collinear antennas and the DSCA array antennas. The use of horizontal polarization reduces the CCI level by approximately 13 dB for the DSCA array antennas with and without beam tilt. The combination of the beam tilt and horizontal polarization or the DSCA array antennas with beam tilt significantly reduces the CCI level by approximately 23 dB.