Impact of mechanical antenna downtilt on performance of WCDMA cellular network

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the impact of the base station mechanical antenna downtilt scheme on the downlink capacity of a 6-sectored WCDMA cellular network of 33° horizontal beamwidth antennas. The effect of the base station antenna height and vertical beamwidth together with site spacing was evaluated in a macrocellular environment and observations were made based on system level simulations utilizing a Monte Carlo approach. The results show that downlink capacity of a WCDMA cellular network obviously depends on the mechanical downtilt angle and the capacity enhancements are based on reduction of other-cell interference. Moreover, the soft and softer handover areas are changed according to mechanical downtilt angle, which clearly depends on the base station antenna height and vertical beamwidth together with site spacing.