Techno-economical analysis and comparison of legacy and ultra-dense small cell networks

Abstract

Network densification has been identified as one key enabling technology to address the 1000x mobile data challenge. This article analyzes network densification from the different deployment options perspective by looking into three mainstream technologies; Macrocells, Microcells, and Femtocells. The technologies are evaluated in a suburban neighborhood with modern residential houses. As majority of the data traffic in the network is believed to be generated by indoor users, we make a techno-economic analysis and comparison of the different deployment strategies from the indoor local area service provisioning viewpoint. Results show superior performance of low power indoor femtocell based deployment solutions in terms of coverage, capacity, energy and cost efficiency as compared to the outdoor solutions. Densifying the traditional pure Macro or Micro layers does provide improvement in the indoor coverage levels, however, due to the closer proximity of the co-channel interfering sites, the achievable capacity in the indoor environment deteriorates, which in turn also affects the energy and cost efficiency. These findings strongly motivate towards ultra dense deployments, based on indoor femtocell solutions, for addressing the local area capacity needs of the emerging future 5G networks.