Addressing 4G Demand: Picos vs. Macros, a Suburban Case Study

A suburban North American city is used as the basis for comparing the relative effectiveness of deploying picocells or macrocells to meet burgeoning 4G traffic demand. The study starts with an existing macro deployment and employs detailed models to examine 3X and 5X traffic growth relative to the capacity of the current macro network. 3D building models are used to generate accurate pathloss planes modeling both outdoor and indoor propagation. Spatial traffic distributions are derived from 3G network data and constrained such that 70% of the users reside indoors. A Monte Carlo simulation utilizes user densities consistent with 3X and 5X traffic growth to determine how many picocells or macrocells are required to meet a 1 Mbps cell edge capacity for both outdoor and indoor users.