Downlink performance of dense antenna deployment: To distribute or concentrate?

Abstract

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (massive MIMO) and small cell densification are complementary key 5G enablers. Given a fixed number of the entire base-station antennas per unit area, this paper fairly compares (i) to deploy few base stations (BSs) and concentrate many antennas on each of them, i.e. massive MIMO, and (ii) to deploy more BSs equipped with few antennas, i.e. small cell densification. We observe that small cell densification always outperforms for both signal-tointerference ratio (SIR) coverage and energy efficiency (EE), when each BS serves multiple users via L number of subbands (multi-carrier transmission). Moreover, we also observe that larger L increases SIR coverage while decreasing EE, thus urging the necessity of optimal 5G network design. These two observations are based on our novel closed-form SIR coverage probability derivation using stochastic geometry, also validated via numerical simulations.

Mean-Field Game-Theoretic Edge Caching

“…The impacts of SBS densification on interference in a UDN have been investigated in [8,22,23,24,25,26,27], in which the interference dynamics is governed by the spatial dynamics of user demand, i.e., locations [8]. While interesting, these works neglect temporal user demand variations.…”