Performance assessment and Self-Organisation of Virtual Sectorisation in a realistic LTE network
conference paper
Active Antenna Systems (AAS) technology is one of several advanced features that enable a mobile network operator to cost-efficiently increase its network capacity to cope with the exponential mobile data traffic growth and the ever more demanding performance requirements. AAS can be exploited to perform e.g. Virtual Sectorisation (ViS), i.e. using beamforming to flexibly position a virtual small cell within the service area of a macro-cell. In this paper we evaluate the performance/capacity potential of ViS in a realistic LTE (Long Term Evolution) network. We apply a planning-oriented approach for positioning virtual sectors, and develop and assess SON (Self-Organizing Networks) algorithms for the adaptive configuration of the ViS deployment. A key distinction herein is made between the cases of power sharing, where the virtual cell fully reuses the macro-cell's bandwidth and shares its transmit power; and bandwidth sharing, where the bandwidth is shared and the full transmit power is used in both cells. The results indicate that ViS offers a significant potential for performance/capacity improvement, with the highest gains observed for the case of bandwidth sharing, where it is further shown that the deployment of a SON algorithm to adapt the ViS configuration to time-varying traffic is essential to reliably achieve the potential gains. © 2016 IEEE.
Topics
Active Antenna SystemsHeterogeneous NetworksLTESelf-Organizing NetworksVirtual SectorisationAntennasAtomic absorption spectrometryBandwidthCellsCytologyDistributed computer systemsHeterogeneous networksLong Term Evolution (LTE)Mobile telecommunication systemsActive antenna systems (AAS)Active antennasMobile data trafficMobile network operatorsPerformance assessmentPerformance requirementsSectorisationSelf-organizing networkWireless telecommunication systems
TNO Identifier
572363
ISBN
9781467387460
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Article nr.
7543973
Source title
9th IFIP Wireless and Mobile Networking Conference, WMNC 2016, 11 July 2016 through 13 July 2016
Pages
81-88
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