Topology and interference analysis in macrocellular environment

In the present day, mobile based data services have become increasingly popular among end users and businesses and thus considered as one of the important issues in the telecommunication network, because of its high demand. The telecommunication industry is continuously striving to fulfil this demand in a cost-efficient manner. Fundamentally, the performance of a mobile communication network is constrained by the propagation environment and technical capabilities of the network equipment. The target of radio network engineers is to design and deploy a mobile network that provides effective coverage and capacity solution with a profitable implementation cost. In order to reach this target, careful examination of radio network planning and choosing the right tools are the key methods. Network densification is considered as a feasible evolutionary pathway to fulfil the exponentially increasing data capacity demand in mobile networks. The objective of this thesis work is to study and analyse the densification of classical macrocellular network, which is still the dominant form of deployment worldwide. The analysis is based on deep ray-tracing based propagation simulations in the outdoor and indoor environment, and considers two key performance metrics; cell spectral efficiency and area spectral efficiency. For analysing the impact of network densification, different cell densities, obtained from varying the inter-site distances are considered. Furthermore, the network is assumed to be operating in a full load condition; an extreme condition in which the base stations are transmitting at full power. From the simulations, it has been illustrated that as a result of densifying the network, the inter-cell interference increases, which reduce the achievable cell spectral efficiency. The system capacity, on the other hand, is shown to improve due to the increase in the area spectral efficiency, as a result of high-frequency re-use, in the outdoor settings. Nevertheless, it is observed that the densification of macrocellular network experience inefficiency in the indoor environment; mainly arising from coverage limitation due to extreme antenna tilt angles. This calls for sophisticated methods such as base station coordination or inter-cell interference cancellation technique to be employed for future cellular network. For fulfilling the indoor capacity demand in a cost-efficient manner, the operators will be required to deploy dedicated indoor small cells based solutions