Upcoming 5G wireless technology will enable various new applications and is going to support a massive amount of devices per cell. In this regard, ultra-dense small cell deployments are a means to cope with the need of extremely high data rates of several tens of Gbps and with the increasing data traffic demand. However, denser deployments may lead to more severe inter-cell interference, which is strongly connected to the actual spatial distribution of the mobile traffic demand. Traffic-adaptive beamforming using phased antenna arrays can be an attractive solution for concentrating capacity at desired traffic hot spot locations while inter-cell interference is reduced. In this paper, we propose a flexible and holistic model, which describes flowlevel performance of networks, which consist of base stations equipped with phased antenna arrays, accurately and considers dynamic inter-cell interference. Moreover, we present a configurable spatial traffic model to generate data traffic maps with various statistical properties. We use these traffic maps to evaluate the performance of a traffic-adaptive beamforming algorithm proposed and compare it the performance of a stateof-the-art antenna down-tilt algorithm.
Self-organizing network (SON) functions can be characterized by their required cooperation between the network elements (NEs). The cooperation among the NEs can include a multitude of possible actions, such as reporting of alarms or coordination of joint parameter modifications at multiple NEs. However, the question for the advantage of cooperation among the NEs in SONs is still an open research topic. By limiting the cooperation between the NEs, the required architectures for utilizing the SON function at hand can be simplified, which in turn can lead to cost savings. In this paper, we investigate the impact of degraded cooperation among the NEs on the SON architecture required and on the performance in a joint capacity and coverage optimization (CCO) use case. For the scenario investigated, we observe that the performance decreases dramatically when decreasing the cooperation among the NEs. However, we can also show that the exchange of information, such as the values of considered key performance indicators (KPIs), among the NEs is more important for an efficient operation than the coordination of the NE's actions. Our results show that, a centralized approach outperforms distributed and localized approaches for the CCO use case investigated.
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