Refined evaluation of wireless network evolution approaches

Operators need to continuously evolve their networks to meet future traffic and data rate demands. Today there is a wide selection of network evolution approaches to choose from. This paper uses a novel evaluation method to evaluate some of those approaches in a simple yet operator specific way. The method takes into account not only conventional dimensioning parameters like targeted user experience, average traffic demand, user density and cell sizes, but also three dimensional spatial user and traffic distribution, site specific propagation, and deployment strategies. It is shown that by applying this method to a low-rise urban scenario the potential capacity gains of higher order sectorization, additional spectrum, and site densification can be predicted. For densification with different node types, such as macro, micro and pico nodes, the respective site counts needed to reach a given performance target can be obtained and compared. Furthermore a comparison of the capacity increase per added low power node shows that there are diminishing returns in a high-rise scenario, but not in a low-rise scenario.